Emissary-ingress

Overview

Emissary-ingress is an open-source Kubernetes-native API Gateway and ingress controller built on Envoy Proxy. It provides advanced traffic management, observability, and security features for cloud-native applications.

The Dash0 integration provides complete observability for Emissary-ingress deployments using OpenTelemetry-native instrumentation for metrics and distributed tracing, plus structured access logs.

For more information, visit the Emissary-ingress Documentation.

Use Cases

Gain comprehensive visibility into your Emissary-ingress setup and optimize performance with the following observability features:

• Monitor Request Flows with Tracing: Visualize the full lifecycle of requests across services. Powered by OpenTelemetry, Emissary-ingress's distributed tracing provides insight into latency, headers, and spans—ideal for debugging and performance tuning.
• Track System and Traffic Metrics: Collect real-time performance data such as request counts, durations, error rates, and connection metrics.
• Audit and Analyze Traffic with Access Logs: Record detailed information about incoming requests, including IPs, headers, duration, response status, and more. Export structured logs via OTLP for centralized analysis in Dash0.
• Monitor Envoy Proxy Statistics: Access detailed Envoy proxy metrics for cluster health, upstream connections, and load balancer statistics.

Use this integration to streamline monitoring of your API gateway traffic, debug routing issues, and ensure your platform services are operating efficiently.

Overview

Emissary ingress includes built-in support for observability via Prometheus metrics, OpenTelemetry tracing, and structured access logs through its underlying Envoy Proxy. This integration uses the recommended pattern of deploying an OpenTelemetry Collector in your cluster to collect telemetry from Emissary ingress and forward it to Dash0.

For more details, refer to the Emissary ingress Observability Documentation.

Configure

Prerequisites

You'll need an OpenTelemetry Collector deployed in your cluster to collect telemetry from Emissary ingress and forward it to Dash0.

For production environments, consider using one of these deployment methods:

• Dash0 operator for Kubernetes
• OpenTelemetry Operator for Kubernetes

• Helm Chart for The OpenTelemetry Collector

For a complete working example with collector configuration, see the Dash0 Emissary ingress Example.

Collecting Telemetry

Step 1: Configure OpenTelemetry Tracing Service

Create a dedicated TracingService resource to configure OpenTelemetry tracing:

Step 2: Configure the Ambassador Module

Configure the Ambassador module with structured logging and reference the tracing service:

Important: The traceparent field in the log format above enables trace correlation. Your OpenTelemetry Collector must be configured to extract the trace_id and span_id from this field for proper log-trace correlation. Configure a transform processor like this:

Step 3: Deploy with Helm

Install or upgrade Emissary ingress with optimized configuration for observability. You can use a values.yaml file:

Then deploy with:

Verification

After deployment, verify that telemetry is being collected:

1. Check OpenTelemetry Collector logs to ensure it's receiving traces from Emissary ingress
2. Verify structured access logs are being generated in JSON format with trace correlation
3. Generate test traffic to your ingress endpoints
4. Monitor Dash0 for incoming metrics, traces, and structured logs from your Emissary ingress deployment

The integration will provide visibility into request routing, performance metrics, distributed traces, and correlated access logs across your API gateway infrastructure.

Refer to the complete example for detailed configuration options.