Running your own Elastic Stack with Kubernetes

If you would like to start a local Elastic Stack with Kubernetes, use manifest-elastic.yml.

This starts Elasticsearch, Kibana and Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry (EDOT) Collector.

Note: If you haven't checked out this repository, all you need is one file:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elastic/elasticsearch-labs/refs/heads/main/k8s/k8s-manifest-elastic.yml

Before you begin, ensure you have free CPU and memory in your cluster. If you plan to use ELSER, assume a minimum of 8 cpus and 6GB memory for the containers in this manifest.

First, start this Elastic Stack in the background:

kubectl apply -f k8s-manifest-elastic.yml

Note: For simplicity, this adds an Elastic Stack to the default namespace. Commands after here are simpler due to this. If you want to choose a different one, use kubectl's --namespace flag!

Next, block until the whole stack is available. First install or changing the Elastic Stack version can take a long time due to image pulling.

kubectl wait --for=condition=available --timeout=10m \
  deployment/elasticsearch \
  deployment/kibana \
  deployment/otel-collector

Next, forward the kibana port:

kubectl port-forward service/kibana 5601:5601 &

Finally, you can view Kibana at http://localhost:5601/app/home#/

If asked for a username and password, use username: elastic and password: elastic.

Clean up when finished, like this:

kubectl delete -f k8s-manifest-elastic.yml

OpenTelemetry

Metrics

If your application only sends logs or traces, you can skip this section.

EDOT Collector supports delta, not cumulative metrics. Applications that send OpenTelemetry metrics using the official OTEL SDK need to export this variable:

OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_METRICS_TEMPORALITY_PREFERENCE=delta

Alternatively, you can use EDOT language SDKs which set this by default.

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