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Container Service for Kubernetes:Enable tracing for cluster control plane components

Last Updated:Mar 26, 2026

When enabled, the API server automatically reports request trace data to Managed Service for OpenTelemetry, giving you tracing details and real-time topology to pinpoint performance bottlenecks and troubleshoot cluster issues. Enabling this feature incurs additional charges for Managed Service for OpenTelemetry beyond your standard ACK cluster costs.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, ensure that you have:

For an overview of Managed Service for OpenTelemetry—including trace mapping, call statistics, trace topology, and application dependency analysis—see Terms. Service Mesh (ASM) integrates with Managed Service for OpenTelemetry. For billing details, see Billing overview.

Step 1: Enable Tracing Analysis for the API server

  1. Log on to the ACK console. In the left-side navigation pane, click Clusters.

  2. On the Clusters page, click the name of the cluster you want to manage. In the left-side navigation pane, choose Operations > Add-ons.

  3. On the Core Components tab, find the Kube API Server card and click Configuration in its lower-right corner.

  4. In the panel that appears, find the enableTrace and samplingRatePerMillion parameters and configure them as prompted.

    Parameter Description
    enableTrace Enables Tracing Analysis for the API server.
    samplingRatePerMillion Controls what percentage of requests are sampled per million. Set this based on your cluster load. For example: 1000000 = 100% (all requests sampled), 100000 = 10%, 10000 = 1%.

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Step 2: View tracing data in the Managed Service for OpenTelemetry console

  1. Log on to the Managed Service for OpenTelemetry console. In the left-side navigation pane, click Applications.

  2. At the top of the page, select a region, then click the application name apiserver.

  3. To filter traces for a specific cluster, enter the following in the Trace Explorer search box:

    resources.k8s.cluster.name : "<ClusterId>"

    Replace <ClusterId> with the cluster ID from your cluster list.

  4. Explore the data using the following tabs:

    Tab What it shows
    Trace Explorer Tracing details and application topology of API server requests. Click a trace ID to see the topology view, number of services involved, and number of calls.
    Provided Services Number of API requests, errors, and average request duration for the API server.
    Dependencies External components the API server depends on, such as etcd—including request counts, error counts, and average response time.

What's next

To enable Tracing Analysis for data plane components, see Enable Tracing Analysis for data plane components.