Observability pipeline

Diagram showing Telemetry, LogSink, and ObservabilityPipeline resources feeding routerd OpenTelemetry SDK signals and routerd event exporter output to OTLP, syslog, stdout, or Loki sinks

Telemetry remains the small OTLP-only resource for routerd's own metrics, traces, and logs. LogSink describes log forwarding routes for operational events and observed network logs; an OTLP LogSink should reference a Telemetry resource rather than duplicating collector endpoints. Use ObservabilityPipeline when the router should also forward routerd event logs to pipeline-style remote sinks such as Loki.

ObservabilityPipeline is a built-in pipeline, not a bundled otelcol process. routerd still uses the normal OpenTelemetry SDK for OTLP logs, metrics, and traces, and it starts a lightweight event exporter for configured log sinks.

Supported log sinks today:

stdout: JSON event lines, useful for supervised service logs.
syslog: local or remote syslog using the existing LogSink syslog shape.
loki: HTTP push to /loki/api/v1/push.

kafka is accepted as documented metadata only so configs can record the intended external pipeline, but routerd does not publish to Kafka directly yet.

Example:

apiVersion: system.routerd.net/v1alpha1
kind: ObservabilityPipeline
metadata:
  name: remote-observability
spec:
  otlp:
    endpoint: http://otel-collector.lan:4317
    insecure: true
    headers:
      authorization: Bearer example-token
  serviceNamespace: routerd
  attributes:
    site: edge
  signals: [logs, metrics, traces]
  sampling:
    rate: 1
  logs:
    sinks:
      - name: loki
        type: loki
        minLevel: info
        loki:
          url: http://loki.lan:3100/loki/api/v1/push
          tenant: routerd

The OTLP fields render to the standard OpenTelemetry environment variables for routerd-managed units. The log sink exporter subscribes to routerd.** events on the in-process bus, so it forwards controller status changes and daemon events without scraping journalctl.

Sampling is deterministic per pipeline and applies before sink fan-out. Keep it at 1 for operational event logs unless a high-volume source is intentionally being downsampled.

See examples/observability-loki.yaml for a complete config.