k8spacket
What is k8spacket?
k8spacket
is a tool which allows you to visualize the TCP traffic in your K8s cluster, and let you understand better how different workloads communicate with each other. Use k8spackt
and Grafana
, you can easily check how many connections that were open, how many bytes were exchanged, and how long those connections were active.
A quick example looks like the following:
k8spacket
is written in Golang that uses third-party libraries (gopacket
) to sniff TCP packets (incoming and outgoing) on workloads, and it creates TCP listeners on running container network interfaces.
When a new container is created, the CNI plugin is responsible for providing the possibility to communicate with other containers or from the cluster to the outside world.
The most common approach is to use Linux namespaces to isolate networks, and veth pairs
to connect isolated namespaces and bridges. However other types can also be created, such as vlan
, ipvlan
and macvlan
. No matter with type, a network interface for the container linux namespace is created, which is the main handle of the k8spacket
sniffer.
k8spacket Features
k8spacket
helps to understand TCP packets traffic in your k8s cluster and has the following features:
Shows traffic between workloads in the cluster
Informs where the traffic is routed outside the cluster
Displays information about closing sockets by connections
Shows how many bytes are sent/received by workloads
Calculates how long the connections are established
k8spacket Installation
k8spacket
can be installed using Helm
, the Chart is available at: https://github.com/k8spacket/k8spacket-helm-chart
Once you have Helm
installed, you can add the repo as follows:
Install k8spacket
:
If you have custom options or values you want to override:
Then you can add the Node Graph API plugin and data source to your Grafana instance, you can do it manually or change the helm value of the Grafana Chart, for example:
Then you can add dashboards configmap
to Grafana stack:
Usage Demo
connection, bytes, duration
You can set the Graph mode
to the following three different types:
Connection — Established connections
Bytes — Total bytes that are sent or received by workloads
Duration — Calculates the lifetime of connections
The following giphy shows three different modes:
Reference
For more details, please visit the k8spacket
Github source code: https://github.com/k8spacket/k8spacket
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