/netobserv-ebpf-agent

Network Observability eBPF Agent

Primary LanguageCApache License 2.0Apache-2.0

Network Observability eBPF Agent

The Network Observability eBPF Agent allows collecting and aggregating all the ingress and egress flows on a Linux host (required a Kernel 4.18+ with eBPF enabled).

How to compile

make build

How to configure

The eBPF Agent is configured by means of environment variables. Check the configuration documentation for more details.

How to run

The NetObserv eBPF Agent is designed to run as a DaemonSet in OpenShift/K8s. It is triggered and configured by our Network Observability Operator.

Anyway you can run it directly as an executable with administrative privileges:

export FLOWS_TARGET_HOST=...
export FLOWS_TARGET_PORT=...
sudo -E bin/netobserv-ebpf-agent

To deploy it as a Pod, you can check the deployment example.

Where is the collector?

As part of our Network Observability solution, the eBPF Agent is designed to send the traced flows to our Flowlogs Pipeline component.

In addition, we provide a simple GRPC+Protobuf library to allow implementing your own collector. Check the packet counter code for an example of a simple collector using our library.

Development receipts

How to regenerate the eBPF Kernel binaries

The eBPF program is embedded into the pkg/ebpf/bpf_* generated files. This step is generally not needed unless you change the C code in the bpf folder.

If you have Docker installed, you just need to run:

make docker-generate

If you can't install docker, you should locally install the following required packages:

dnf install -y kernel-devel make llvm clang glibc-devel.i686
make generate

Tested in Fedora 35 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.

Known issues

Extrenal Traffic in Openshift (OVN-Kubernetes CNI)

For egress traffic, you can see the source Pod metadata. For ingress traffic (e.g. an HTTP response), you see the destination Host metadata.