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About Network Observability

Red Hat offers cluster administrators and developers the Network Observability Operator to observe the network traffic for OpenShift Container Platform clusters. The Network Observability Operator uses the eBPF technology to create network flows. The network flows are then enriched with OpenShift Container Platform information. They are available as Prometheus metrics or as logs in Loki. You can view and analyze the stored network flows information in the OpenShift Container Platform console for further insight and troubleshooting.

Optional dependencies of the Network Observability Operator

  • Loki Operator: Loki is the backend that can be used to store all collected flows with a maximal level of details. You can choose to use Network Observability without Loki, but there are some considerations for doing this, as described in the linked section. If you choose to install Loki, it is recommended to use the Loki Operator, which is supported by Red Hat.

  • AMQ Streams Operator: Kafka provides scalability, resiliency and high availability in the OpenShift Container Platform cluster for large scale deployments. If you choose to use Kafka, it is recommended to use the AMQ Streams Operator, because it is supported by Red Hat.

Network Observability Operator

The Network Observability Operator provides the Flow Collector API custom resource definition. A Flow Collector instance is a cluster-scoped resource that enables configuration of network flow collection. The Flow Collector instance deploys pods and services that form a monitoring pipeline where network flows are then collected and enriched with the Kubernetes metadata before storing in Loki or generating Prometheus metrics. The eBPF agent, which is deployed as a daemonset object, creates the network flows.

OpenShift Container Platform console integration

OpenShift Container Platform console integration offers overview, topology view, and traffic flow tables in both Administrator and Developer perspectives.

In the Administrator perspective, you can find the Network Observability Overview, Traffic flows, and Topology views by clicking Observe → Network Traffic. In the Developer perspective, you can view this information by clicking Observe. The Network Observability metrics dashboards in Observe → Dashboards are only available to administrators.

To enable multi-tenancy for the developer perspective and for administrators with limited access to namespaces, you must specify permissions by defining roles. For more information, see Enabling multi-tenancy in Network Observability.

Network Observability metrics dashboards

On the Overview tab in the OpenShift Container Platform console, you can view the overall aggregated metrics of the network traffic flow on the cluster. You can choose to display the information by zone, node, namespace, owner, pod, and service. Filters and display options can further refine the metrics. For more information, see Observing the network traffic from the Overview view.

In Observe → Dashboards, the Netobserv dashboards provide a quick overview of the network flows in your OpenShift Container Platform cluster. The Netobserv/Health dashboard provides metrics about the health of the Operator. For more information, see Network Observability Metrics and Viewing health information.

Network Observability topology views

The OpenShift Container Platform console offers the Topology tab which displays a graphical representation of the network flows and the amount of traffic. The topology view represents traffic between the OpenShift Container Platform components as a network graph. You can refine the graph by using the filters and display options. You can access the information for zone, node, namespace, owner, pod, and service.

Traffic flow tables

The Traffic flow table view provides a view for raw flows, non aggregated filtering options, and configurable columns. The OpenShift Container Platform console offers the Traffic flows tab which displays the data of the network flows and the amount of traffic.

Network Observability CLI

You can quickly debug and troubleshoot networking issues with Network Observability by using the Network Observability CLI (oc netobserv). The Network Observability CLI is a flow and packet visualization tool that relies on eBPF agents to stream collected data to an ephemeral collector pod. It requires no persistent storage during the capture. After the run, the output is transferred to your local machine. This enables quick, live insight into packets and flow data without installing the Network Observability Operator.