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Last modified July 6, 2026

OTLP ingestion reference

This page describes the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) ingestion interface of the Giant Swarm Observability Platform. It documents the gateway endpoints and ports, the SDK environment variables the platform recognizes, and how OTLP data is routed to a tenant.

For the task-oriented steps to configure an application to send data, see the data ingestion guide.

Availability

OTLP ingestion is available in alpha from cluster release v31 and fully supported from v33. It must be enabled for your installation before use. Request it through your Account Engineer. Data sent to a tenant that doesn’t exist is dropped.

Gateway endpoints

Each cluster runs a local OTLP gateway (otlp-gateway.kube-system.svc) that accepts metrics, logs, and traces and forwards them to central storage.

ProtocolEndpointPort
OTLP/gRPCotlp-gateway.kube-system.svc:43174317
OTLP/HTTPhttp://otlp-gateway.kube-system.svc:43184318

SDK environment variables

Applications are configured with the standard OpenTelemetry SDK environment variables. The variables the platform relies on most often:

VariableDescription
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINTOTLP gateway endpoint (for example http://otlp-gateway.kube-system.svc:4318)
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERSAdditional headers to send with each export; used to set X-Scope-OrgID (see tenant routing)
OTEL_METRICS_EXPORTERSet to otlp to enable metrics export
OTEL_LOGS_EXPORTERSet to otlp to enable log export
OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTERSet to otlp to enable trace export (usually the SDK default)
OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTESResource attributes such as service.name, deployment.environment
OTEL_TRACES_SAMPLERTrace sampling strategy (for example always_on, parentbased_always_on)
OTEL_TRACES_SAMPLER_ARGAdditional arguments for the sampler

Tenant routing

OTLP data is routed to a tenant using one of two mechanisms:

MechanismApplies toHow to set it
X-Scope-OrgID HTTP headerOTLP/HTTP (port 4318)Set via the OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS environment variable, for example X-Scope-OrgID=my_tenant
observability.giantswarm.io/tenant pod labelOTLP/gRPC and OTLP/HTTPAdd the label to the pods sending OTLP data

When both are present, the X-Scope-OrgID header takes precedence over the pod label.

See also