Network metrics

OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation can be configured to provide network metrics between different endpoints. For example, between physical nodes, containers, Kubernetes pods, services, etc.

Get started

To get started using OBI networking metrics, consult the quickstart setup documentation, and for advanced configuration, consult the configuration documentation.

Network metrics

OBI provides byte and packet flow metrics, plus an inter-zone byte metric:

Flow metrics: capture the bytes sent and received between different endpoints, from the application point of view.

• obi.network.flow.bytes, if it is exported via OpenTelemetry.
• obi_network_flow_bytes_total, if it is exported by a Prometheus endpoint.
• To enable it, add the network option to the OTEL_EBPF_METRICS_FEATURES configuration option.

Flow packet metrics: count the packets sent and received between endpoints.

• obi.network.flow.packets, if exported via OpenTelemetry.
• obi_network_flow_packets_total, if exported by a Prometheus endpoint.
• To enable it, add the network_flow_packets option to OTEL_EBPF_METRICS_FEATURES.

Inter-zone metrics: capture the bytes sent and received between different availability zones, from the application point of view.

• obi.network.inter.zone.bytes, if it is exported via OpenTelemetry.
• obi_network_inter_zone_bytes_total, if it is exported by a Prometheus endpoint.
• To enable it, add the network_inter_zone option to the OTEL_EBPF_METRICS_FEATURES configuration option.

By default, only the following attributes are reported for network flow bytes: k8s.src.owner.name, k8s.src.namespace, k8s.dst.owner.name, k8s.dst.namespace, and k8s.cluster.name.

For the inter-zone bytes metric, the default attributes are k8s.cluster.name, src.zone, and dst.zone.

Metric attributes

Network metrics are labeled with the following attributes:

Metric reduction

For high-cardinality reductions, the network metrics are pre-aggregated at the process level to reduce the number of metrics sent to the metrics backend.

By default, all metrics are aggregated by the following attributes:

• direction
• transport
• src.address
• dst.address
• src.port
• dst.port

You can specify which attributes are allowed in the OBI configuration, to aggregate the metric by them.

For example, to aggregate network metrics by source and destination Kubernetes owner (instead of the default individual pod names), you can use the following configuration:

network:
  allowed_attributes:
    - k8s.src.owner.name
    - k8s.dst.owner.name
    - k8s.src.owner.type
    - k8s.dst.owner.type

Then, the equivalent Prometheus metric would be:

obi_network_flow_bytes:
  k8s_src_owner_name="frontend"
  k8s_src_owner_type="deployment"
  k8s_dst_owner_name="backend"
  k8s_dst_owner_type="deployment"

The previous example would aggregate the obi.network.flow.bytes value by source and destination Kubernetes owner name and type, instead of individual pod names.

CIDR-based metrics

You can configure OBI to also break down metrics by CIDR ranges. This is useful for tracking traffic to specific network ranges, such as cloud provider IP ranges, or internal/external traffic.

The cidrs YAML subsection in network (or the OTEL_EBPF_NETWORK_CIDRS environment variable) accepts a list of CIDR ranges, and the corresponding name. For example:

network:
  cidrs:
    - cidr: 10.0.0.0/8
      name: 'cluster-internal'
    - cidr: 192.168.0.0/16
      name: 'private'
    - cidr: 172.16.0.0/12
      name: 'container-internal'

Then, the equivalent Prometheus metric would be:

obi_network_flow_bytes:
  src_cidr="cluster-internal"
  dst_cidr="private"