Deploy OpenTelemetry Gateway on AWS: Monitoring Your Observability Pipeline

This article explains how to deploy an OpenTelemetry gateway on Amazon EKS and instrument it to monitor the observability pipeline itself, ensuring telemetry data isn't silently dropped.

• Deploy OpenTelemetry collectors in agent-to-gateway pattern: DaemonSet agents on each node forward telemetry to a centralized gateway Deployment
• Gateway batches, authenticates, and exports metrics to CloudWatch using native OTLP HTTP+SigV4 endpoint
• Enable CloudWatch Observability EKS add-on for infrastructure metrics and container logs via Container Insights
• Configure gateway self-monitoring with metrics like receiver_accepted_metric_points, exporter_sent_metric_points, and queue_size
• Create CloudWatch alarms using PromQL for queue saturation, export failures, and export success ratio SLOs
• Use CloudWatch Query Studio to query pipeline health with PromQL and build dashboards for operations teams
• Scale to multiple clusters by promoting gateway to shared tier behind internal Network Load Balancer

This "Monitor the Monitoring Pipeline" pattern ensures visibility into observability infrastructure health and enables early detection of pipeline degradation.