Dash0, an OpenTelemetry-native observability platform, recently published a Dapr integration, with details and a guide available here. By combining Dapr’s built‑in telemetry generation with Dash0’s analysis engine, you get end‑to‑end observability with minimal setup, no instrumentation boilerplate, and full control over cost and configuration.
What the Integration Provides
- Traces: Dapr automatically generates OpenTelemetry spans for service invocation, pub/sub messaging, bindings, actor calls, state access, and secret lookups. These spans can be collected and sent to Dash0 for analysis.
- Metrics: Runtime metrics from the Dapr sidecar (such as request counts, latency, errors) are exported via OpenTelemetry and can be visualized and queried in Dash0.
- Logs: Dapr sidecar logs can also be ingested, providing a unified view across services.
Setup Overview
- Deploy an OpenTelemetry Collector in your Kubernetes cluster. This can be done using the Dash0 Operator, the OpenTelemetry Operator, or Helm charts.
- Configure the Collector to accept OTLP/gRPC input (default port 4317) and forward the data to Dash0, including authentication tokens.
- Update Dapr Configuration so that the OTLP exporter points to the Collector service.
- Annotate Application Pods to enable telemetry capture from Dapr sidecars.
- Run Applications and verify telemetry in Dash0.
Use Cases
- Trace message flows across pub/sub topics
- Measure request/response latency for service invocation
- Inspect actor lifecycle and state transitions
- Monitor health and performance of the Dapr runtime
The Dash0-Dapr integration makes it possible to observe Dapr workloads in Dash0 with minimal configuration. Since both systems rely on OpenTelemetry, the setup is consistent with other OTLP-based observability pipelines.
Check out the integration details and the guide available here.
