Solution Brief

Kentik Kube

Now Kubernetes deployments are observable

Kentik has launched a beta version of Kentik Kube as another feature of our Kentik Cloud offering. This new service offering enables network and DevOps professionals to gain full visibility of network traffic within the context of their Kubernetes deployments.

Kentik provides comprehensive network observability. We are extending this observability to Kubernetes deployments.

Very often, pods and services experience network delays that degrade the digital experience. Until now, there has not been a means to identify which Kubernetes services and pods are experiencing network delays. The complexity of microservices leaves developers wondering if the network reality matches their design, who are the top requesters consuming Kubernetes services or which microservices are oversubscribed, and how the infrastructure is communicating both within itself or across the internet.

How Kentik Kube works

Kentik Kube relies on data generated from a lightweight eBPF agent that is installed onto your Kubernetes cluster. It sends data back to the Kentik SaaS platform, allowing you to query, graph, and alert on conditions in your data. This data coupled with the analytics engine, enables users to gain complete visibility and context for traffic performance inside and among Kubernetes clusters. We built Kentik Kube to provide visibility for cloud-managed Kubernetes clusters (AKS, EKS, and GKE) and on-prem, self-managed clusters using the most widely implemented network models.

Use Kentik Kube to:

Identify network performance issues: Discover which services and pods are experiencing network delays so you can troubleshoot and fix problems faster. Identify service misconfigurations without capturing packets. Configure alert policies to proactively find high latency impacting nodes, pods, workloads or services.

Determine top talkers: Identify clients/requesters consuming your Kubernetes services so you can track down problematic connections. Discover oversubscribed microservices so you can adjust scaling, configure node affinity, etc. Know exactly who was talking to which pod, and when.

Validate policies: Ensure that your network reality matches your design. See which pods, namespaces and services are speaking with each other to ensure that your configured policy is working as expected.

Visualize all network infrastructure: Know which pods were deployed on which nodes - even historically. See which pods and services are communicating with non-Kubernetes infrastructure or the internet. View your network from container to cloud.

Visualizing with Kentik Kube

Kentik Kube provides east-west and north-south traffic analytics inside and among Kubernetes clusters. Kentik will automatically detail your network map once you have deployed the eBPF sidecar.

Network map showing EKS clusters communicating with the internet and within and between AWS regions

Kentik Kube can display details to see if your route tables, NACLs, etc. are all configured correctly. You can drill down into a cluster to see if there are latency or other issues. Our eBPF telemetry agent deployed into these clusters lets you see the traffic between the nodes and the latency.