Karpenter

Karpenter Integration in Dash0

Karpenter is an open-source, high-performance Kubernetes node autoscaler that provisions right-sized compute nodes in response to unschedulable pods. Unlike the Cluster Autoscaler, Karpenter works directly with your cloud provider to launch nodes that exactly match workload requirements, reducing both scheduling latency and cloud spend.

This Dash0 integration surfaces Karpenter's Prometheus metrics via OpenTelemetry so you can observe node provisioning rates, disruption events, pod churn, and scheduling latency — giving you the insight needed to tune NodePools and consolidation policies effectively.

For more information, visit the Karpenter Project Page.

Use Cases

Optimize Kubernetes infrastructure costs and reliability with this integration:

• Monitor Node Provisioning: Track how quickly Karpenter responds to unschedulable pods and provisions new nodes to detect bottlenecks.
• Analyze Disruption Events: Understand consolidation, drift, expiration, and interruption patterns to reduce unnecessary node churn.
• Track Pod Scheduling Latency: Measure time from pod pending to node ready to identify slow provisioning paths.
• Understand NodePool Utilization: Monitor resource allocation across NodePools to fine-tune instance type selection and limits.
• Optimize Cloud Costs: Correlate Karpenter's consolidation activity with node lifecycle events to validate cost-saving policies.

Overview

This guide covers two observability signals for Karpenter:

• Metrics — Karpenter exposes a Prometheus endpoint on port 8080 in the kube-system namespace. The OpenTelemetry Collector scrapes this and forwards metrics to Dash0 using the karpenter_ metric prefix, covering node provisioning, disruption, pod scheduling, and resource allocation.
• Logs — Karpenter controllers emit structured JSON logs that can be collected automatically by the Dash0 Operator or manually via the filelog receiver.

Prerequisites

Before setting up Karpenter monitoring, ensure:

• Karpenter is installed and running (kubectl get pods -n kube-system -l app.kubernetes.io/name=karpenter shows healthy pods)
• You have access to the kube-system namespace
• You have an OpenTelemetry Collector deployed and reachable from the kube-system namespace

You'll need an OpenTelemetry Collector deployed. Consider using:

• Dash0 operator for Kubernetes (recommended)
• OpenTelemetry Operator for Kubernetes

• Helm Chart for The OpenTelemetry Collector

Collector Configuration

Karpenter exposes Prometheus metrics on port 8080 and creates a Kubernetes Service named karpenter in kube-system. Configure the OpenTelemetry Collector's Prometheus receiver to scrape it:

If you are using the Dash0 Operator, first create a Dash0Monitoring resource in the kube-system namespace to enable Prometheus scraping. The instrumentWorkloads.mode: none setting is required because the operator does not support auto-instrumentation of system namespaces:

For more options, see the Prometheus Receiver documentation.

Logs

Karpenter controllers write structured JSON logs using the Zap logger through controller-runtime. Log lines include fields like the controller name, reconciled object, log level, and message — making them straightforward to filter in Dash0.

Dash0 Operator

If you applied a Dash0Monitoring resource to the kube-system namespace (as shown in the Collector Configuration section above), the Dash0 Operator automatically collects pod logs from all Karpenter controllers in that namespace. No additional configuration is required.

OTel Operator or Helm Chart

To collect Karpenter logs manually, add a filelog receiver targeting the kube-system namespace and filtering for Karpenter pods:

To increase log verbosity for debugging, set the LOG_LEVEL environment variable on the Karpenter deployment to debug:

Verification

Metrics

1. Check collector logs for successful scrape of the karpenter target
2. Navigate to Metrics Explorer in Dash0
3. Search for metrics with prefix karpenter_

karpenter_nodes_created_total and karpenter_scheduler_scheduling_duration_seconds only appear after Karpenter has provisioned at least one node. Deploy a workload that requests more resources than the existing nodes provide to trigger provisioning.

Logs

1. Navigate to Logs in Dash0
2. Filter by namespace: kube-system and k8s.deployment.name: karpenter

Key metrics to verify:

Metric	Description
karpenter_nodes_created_total	Total nodes created by Karpenter
karpenter_scheduler_scheduling_duration_seconds	Duration of scheduling simulations in seconds
karpenter_voluntary_disruption_eligible_nodes	Nodes currently eligible for disruption by Karpenter
karpenter_pods_state	Pod counts by scheduling state
karpenter_nodepools_usage	Resource usage per NodePool (CPU, memory, pods)

References

• Karpenter Metrics Documentation
• Karpenter Installation Guide
• OpenTelemetry Prometheus Receiver
• OpenTelemetry Filelog Receiver