Chapter 3. About network observability

The Network Observability Operator provides the FlowCollector API custom resource. A FlowCollector instance is a cluster-scoped resource that enables configuration of network flow collection. This instance deploys pods and services that form a monitoring pipeline.

The eBPF agent is deployed as a daemonset object and creates the network flows. The pipeline collects and enriches network flows with Kubernetes metadata before storing them in Loki or generating Prometheus metrics.

You can optionally integrate the Network Observability Operator with other components to enhance its functionality and scalability. Supported optional dependencies include the Loki Operator for flow storage, and AMQ Streams for large-scale data handling with Kafka.

OpenShift Container Platform console integration offers an overview, a topology view, and traffic flow tables. The Network observability metrics dashboards in Observe Dashboards are available only to users with administrator access.

You can quickly debug and troubleshoot networking issues with network observability by using the Network Observability command-line interface (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.