Cilium

Cilium Integration in Dash0

Cilium is an open-source networking and security solution for Kubernetes and cloud-native environments. It leverages eBPF to provide high-performance networking, identity-aware security, and deep observability for modern microservices architectures.

This Dash0 integration enhances visibility over network traffic within Kubernetes clusters, ensuring secure and efficient communication between services.

For more information, visit the Cilium website.

Use Cases

Improve networking, security, and observability in your Kubernetes deployments with this integration:

• Monitor Service Dependencies: Gain deep insights into how services interact with each other and detect potential bottlenecks.
• Troubleshoot Network Issues: Identify connectivity failures, analyze DNS resolution problems, and track dropped packets in real-time.
• Observe Application Traffic: Collect detailed telemetry on HTTP, gRPC, and Kafka traffic to improve performance and security.

Overview

Cilium provides built-in observability features, allowing users to monitor networking, security, and performance metrics across Kubernetes workloads. These metrics cover:

• Cilium agent: Handles networking and security enforcement.
• Cilium operator: Manages cluster-wide functions.
• Envoy proxy: If enabled, provides L7 visibility.
• Hubble: Offers deep network flow observability.

For more details, refer to the Cilium Observability Documentation.

Configure

Enable Cilium Metrics

To enable metrics, install Cilium with the following Helm command:

This enables metrics for cilium-agent, cilium-operator, and Envoy (if enabled).

Enable Hubble Metrics

Hubble provides flow-level visibility, allowing insights into network traffic, policy decisions, and service communication.

To enable Hubble metrics:

For further details, refer to the official documentation.