Originally published on the HostingPodium Enterprise Engineering Blog .

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This guide details a production-grade deployment of OpenTelemetry tracing, Grafana Tempo storage, Loki log correlation, and Prometheus exemplars on Kubernetes. It includes configuration, scaling, and runbook procedures for reliable observability.

Scope and assumptions

This guide targets production clusters running Kubernetes 1.27+ on bare-metal or cloud VMs. All components are deployed as native Kubernetes objects; no external SaaS services are referenced. The reference implementation uses the OpenTelemetry Collector DaemonSet, Grafana Tempo for trace storage, Loki for log aggregation, and Prometheus with exemplars for latency SLOs.…