Network Flow Visibility in Antrea

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Flow Exporter
  • Configuration
  • IPFIX Information Elements (IEs) in a Flow Record
    • IEs from IANA-assigned IE Registry
    • IEs from Reverse IANA-assigned IE Registry
    • IEs from Antrea IE Registry
  • Supported capabilities
    • Types of Flows and Associated Information
    • Connection Metrics
• Flow Aggregator
  • Deployment
  • Configuration
  • IPFIX Information Elements (IEs) in an Aggregated Flow Record
    • IEs from Antrea IE Registry
  • Supported capabilities
    • Storage of Flow Records
    • Correlation of Flow Records
    • Aggregation of Flow Records
  • Antctl support
• Quick deployment
• Flow Collectors
  • Go-ipfix Collector
    • Deployment Steps
    • Output Flow Records
  • Grafana Flow Collector
    • Purpose
    • About Grafana and ClickHouse
    • Deployment Steps
      • Credentials Configuration
      • ClickHouse Configuration
    • Pre-built Dashboards
      • Flow Records Dashboard
      • Pod-to-Pod Flows Dashboard
      • Pod-to-External Flows Dashboard
      • Pod-to-Service Flows Dashboard
      • Node-to-Node Flows Dashboard
      • Network-Policy Flows Dashboard
    • Dashboards Customization
  • ELK Flow Collector (deprecated)
    • Purpose
    • About Elastic Stack
    • Deployment Steps
    • Pre-built Dashboards
      • Overview
      • Pod-to-Pod Flows
      • Pod-to-External Flows
      • Pod-to-Service Flows
      • Flow Records
      • Node Throughput
      • Network Policy

Overview

Antrea is a Kubernetes network plugin that provides network connectivity and security features for Pod workloads. Considering the scale and dynamism of Kubernetes workloads in a cluster, Network Flow Visibility helps in the management and configuration of Kubernetes resources such as Network Policy, Services, Pods etc., and thereby provides opportunities to enhance the performance and security aspects of Pod workloads.

For visualizing the network flows, Antrea monitors the flows in Linux conntrack module. These flows are converted to flow records, and then flow records are post-processed before they are sent to the configured external flow collector. High-level design is given below:

Flow Exporter

In Antrea, the basic building block for the Network Flow Visibility is the Flow Exporter. Flow Exporter operates within Antrea Agent; it builds and maintains a connection store by polling and dumping flows from conntrack module periodically. Connections from the connection store are exported to the Flow Aggregator Service using the IPFIX protocol, and for this purpose we use the IPFIX exporter process from the go-ipfix library.

Configuration

To enable the Flow Exporter feature at the Antrea Agent, the following config parameters have to be set in the Antrea Agent ConfigMap:

  antrea-agent.conf: |
    # FeatureGates is a map of feature names to bools that enable or disable experimental features.
    featureGates:
    # Enable flowexporter which exports polled conntrack connections as IPFIX flow records from each agent to a configured collector.
      FlowExporter: true

    # Provide the IPFIX collector address as a string with format <HOST>:[<PORT>][:<PROTO>].
    # HOST can either be the DNS name or the IP of the Flow Collector. For example,
    # "flow-aggregator.flow-aggregator.svc" can be provided as a DNS name to connect
    # to the Antrea Flow Aggregator Service. If IP, it can be either IPv4 or IPv6.
    # However, IPv6 address should be wrapped with [].
    # If PORT is empty, we default to 4739, the standard IPFIX port.
    # If no PROTO is given, we consider "tls" as default. We support "tls", "tcp" and
    # "udp" protocols. "tls" is used for securing communication between flow exporter and
    # flow aggregator.
    #flowCollectorAddr: "flow-aggregator.flow-aggregator.svc:4739:tls"
    
    # Provide flow poll interval as a duration string. This determines how often the
    # flow exporter dumps connections from the conntrack module. Flow poll interval
    # should be greater than or equal to 1s (one second).
    # Valid time units are "ns", "us" (or "µs"), "ms", "s", "m", "h".
    #flowPollInterval: "5s"

    # Provide the active flow export timeout, which is the timeout after which a flow
    # record is sent to the collector for active flows. Thus, for flows with a continuous
    # stream of packets, a flow record will be exported to the collector once the elapsed
    # time since the last export event is equal to the value of this timeout.
    # Valid time units are "ns", "us" (or "µs"), "ms", "s", "m", "h".
    #activeFlowExportTimeout: "60s"

    # Provide the idle flow export timeout, which is the timeout after which a flow
    # record is sent to the collector for idle flows. A flow is considered idle if no
    # packet matching this flow has been observed since the last export event.
    # Valid time units are "ns", "us" (or "µs"), "ms", "s", "m", "h".
    #idleFlowExportTimeout: "15s"    

Please note that the default value for flowCollectorAddr is "flow-aggregator.flow-aggregator.svc:4739:tls", which uses the DNS name of the Flow Aggregator Service, if the Service is deployed with the Name and Namespace set to flow-aggregator. For Antrea Agent running on a Windows node, the user is required to change the default value of HOST in flowCollectorAddr from DNS name to the Cluster IP of the Flow Aggregator Service. The reason is because on Windows the Antrea Agent runs as a process, it uses the host’s default DNS setting and the DNS resolver will not be configured to talk to the CoreDNS Service for cluster local DNS queries like flow-aggregator.flow-aggregator.svc. In addition, if you deploy the Flow Aggregator Service with a different Name and Namespace, then either use the appropriate DNS name or the Cluster IP of the Service.

Please note that the default values for flowPollInterval, activeFlowExportTimeout, and idleFlowExportTimeout parameters are set to 5s, 60s, and 15s, respectively. TLS communication between the Flow Exporter and the Flow Aggregator is enabled by default. Please modify them as per your requirements.

IPFIX Information Elements (IEs) in a Flow Record

There are 34 IPFIX IEs in each exported flow record, which are defined in the IANA-assigned IE registry, the Reverse IANA-assigned IE registry and the Antrea IE registry. The reverse IEs are used to provide bi-directional information about the flow. The Enterprise ID is 0 for IANA-assigned IE registry, 29305 for reverse IANA IE registry, 56505 for Antrea IE registry. All the IEs used by the Antrea Flow Exporter are listed below:

IEs from IANA-assigned IE Registry

IEs from Reverse IANA-assigned IE Registry

IEs from Antrea IE Registry

Supported capabilities

Types of Flows and Associated Information

Currently, the Flow Exporter feature provides visibility for Pod-to-Pod, Pod-to-Service and Pod-to-External network flows along with the associated statistics such as data throughput (bits per second), packet throughput (packets per second), cumulative byte count and cumulative packet count. Pod-To-Service flow visibility is supported only when Antrea Proxy enabled, which is the case by default starting with Antrea v0.11. In the future, we will enable the support for External-To-Service flows.

Kubernetes information such as Node name, Pod name, Pod Namespace, Service name, NetworkPolicy name and NetworkPolicy Namespace, is added to the flow records. Network Policy Rule Action (Allow, Reject, Drop) is also supported for both Antrea-native NetworkPolicies and K8s NetworkPolicies. For K8s NetworkPolicies, connections dropped due to isolated Pod behavior will be assigned the Drop action. For flow records that are exported from any given Antrea Agent, the Flow Exporter only provides the information of Kubernetes entities that are local to the Antrea Agent. In other words, flow records are only complete for intra-Node flows, but incomplete for inter-Node flows. It is the responsibility of the Flow Aggregator to correlate flows from the source and destination Nodes and produce complete flow records.

Both Flow Exporter and Flow Aggregator are supported in IPv4 clusters, IPv6 clusters and dual-stack clusters.

Connection Metrics

We support following connection metrics as Prometheus metrics that are exposed through Antrea Agent apiserver endpoint: antrea_agent_conntrack_total_connection_count, antrea_agent_conntrack_antrea_connection_count, antrea_agent_denied_connection_count, antrea_agent_conntrack_max_connection_count, and antrea_agent_flow_collector_reconnection_count

Flow Aggregator

Flow Aggregator is deployed as a Kubernetes Service. The main functionality of Flow Aggregator is to store, correlate and aggregate the flow records received from the Flow Exporter of Antrea Agents. More details on the functionality are provided in the Supported Capabilities section.

Flow Aggregator is implemented as IPFIX mediator, which consists of IPFIX Collector Process, IPFIX Intermediate Process and IPFIX Exporter Process. We use the go-ipfix library to implement the Flow Aggregator.

Deployment

To deploy a released version of Flow Aggregator Service, pick a deployment manifest from the list of releases. For any given release <TAG> (e.g. v0.12.0), you can deploy Flow Aggregator as follows:

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/antrea-io/antrea/releases/download/<TAG>/flow-aggregator.yml

To deploy the latest version of Flow Aggregator Service (built from the main branch), use the checked-in deployment yaml:

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/antrea-io/antrea/main/build/yamls/flow-aggregator.yml

Configuration

The following configuration parameters have to be provided through the Flow Aggregator ConfigMap. Flow aggregator needs to be configured with at least one of the supported Flow Collectors. flowCollector is mandatory for go-ipfix collector or ELK flow collector, and clickHouse is mandatory for Grafana Flow Collector. We provide an example value for this parameter in the following snippet.

• If you have deployed the go-ipfix collector, then please set flowCollector.enable to true and use the address for flowCollector.address: <Ipfix-Collector Cluster IP>:<port>:<tcp|udp>
• If you have deployed the ELK flow collector, then please set flowCollector.enable to true and use the address for flowCollector.address:<Logstash Cluster IP>:4739:<tcp|udp> for sending IPFIX messages, or <Logstash Cluster IP>:4736:<tcp|udp> for sending JSON format records. Record format is specified with flowCollector.recordFormat (defaults to IPFIX) and must match the format expected by the collector.
• If you have deployed the Grafana Flow Collector, then please enable the collector by setting clickHouse.enable to true. If it is deployed following the deployment steps, the ClickHouse server is already exposed via a K8s Service, and no further configuration is required. If a different FQDN or IP is desired, please use the URL for clickHouse.databaseURL in the following format: tcp://<ClickHouse server FQDN or IP>:<ClickHouse TCP port>.

flow-aggregator.conf: |  
  # Provide the active flow record timeout as a duration string. This determines
  # how often the flow aggregator exports the active flow records to the flow
  # collector. Thus, for flows with a continuous stream of packets, a flow record
  # will be exported to the collector once the elapsed time since the last export
  # event in the flow aggregator is equal to the value of this timeout.
  # Valid time units are "ns", "us" (or "µs"), "ms", "s", "m", "h".
  #activeFlowRecordTimeout: 60s

  # Provide the inactive flow record timeout as a duration string. This determines
  # how often the flow aggregator exports the inactive flow records to the flow
  # collector. A flow record is considered to be inactive if no matching record
  # has been received by the flow aggregator in the specified interval.
  # Valid time units are "ns", "us" (or "µs"), "ms", "s", "m", "h".
  #inactiveFlowRecordTimeout: 90s
  
  # Provide the transport protocol for the flow aggregator collecting process, which is tls, tcp or udp.
  #aggregatorTransportProtocol: "tls"
  
  # Provide DNS name or IP address of flow aggregator for generating TLS certificate. It must match
  # the flowCollectorAddr parameter in the antrea-agent config.
  #flowAggregatorAddress: "flow-aggregator.flow-aggregator.svc"

  # recordContents enables configuring some fields in the flow records. Fields can
  # be excluded to reduce record size, but some features or external tooling may
  # depend on these fields.
  recordContents:
    # Determine whether source and destination Pod labels will be included in the flow records.
    #podLabels: false

  # apiServer contains APIServer related configuration options.
  apiServer:
    # The port for the flow-aggregator APIServer to serve on.
    #apiPort: 10348

    # Comma-separated list of Cipher Suites. If omitted, the default Go Cipher Suites will be used.
    # https://golang.org/pkg/crypto/tls/#pkg-constants
    # Note that TLS1.3 Cipher Suites cannot be added to the list. But the apiserver will always
    # prefer TLS1.3 Cipher Suites whenever possible.
    #tlsCipherSuites:

    # TLS min version from: VersionTLS10, VersionTLS11, VersionTLS12, VersionTLS13.
    #tlsMinVersion:
  
  # flowCollector contains external IPFIX or JSON collector related configuration options.
  flowCollector:
    # Enable is the switch to enable exporting flow records to external flow collector.
    #enable: false
  
    # Provide the flow collector address as string with format <IP>:<port>[:<proto>], where proto is tcp or udp.
    # If no L4 transport proto is given, we consider tcp as default.
    address: "192.168.86.86:4739:tcp"
  
    # Provide the 32-bit Observation Domain ID which will uniquely identify this instance of the flow
    # aggregator to an external flow collector. If omitted, an Observation Domain ID will be generated
    # from the persistent cluster UUID generated by Antrea. Failing that (e.g. because the cluster UUID
    # is not available), a value will be randomly generated, which may vary across restarts of the flow
    # aggregator.
    #observationDomainID:
  
    # Provide format for records sent to the configured flow collector.
    # Supported formats are IPFIX and JSON.
    #recordFormat: "IPFIX"
  
  # clickHouse contains ClickHouse related configuration options.
  clickHouse:
    # Enable is the switch to enable exporting flow records to ClickHouse.
    #enable: false
  
    # Database is the name of database where Antrea "flows" table is created.
    #database: "default"
  
    # DatabaseURL is the url to the database. TCP protocol is required.
    #databaseURL: "tcp://clickhouse-clickhouse.flow-visibility.svc:9000"
  
    # Debug enables debug logs from ClickHouse sql driver.
    #debug: false
  
    # Compress enables lz4 compression when committing flow records.
    #compress: true
  
    # CommitInterval is the periodical interval between batch commit of flow records to DB.
    # Valid time units are "ns", "us" (or "µs"), "ms", "s", "m", "h".
    # The minimum interval is 1s based on ClickHouse documentation for best performance.
    #commitInterval: "8s"

Please note that the default values for activeFlowRecordTimeout, inactiveFlowRecordTimeout, aggregatorTransportProtocol, and flowAggregatorAddress parameters are set to 60s, 90s, tls and flow-aggregator.flow-aggregator.svc, respectively. Please make sure that aggregatorTransportProtocol and protocol of flowCollectorAddr in agent-agent.conf are set to tls to guarantee secure communication works properly. Protocol of flowCollectorAddr and aggregatorTransportProtocol must always match, so TLS must either be enabled for both sides or disabled for both sides. Please modify the parameters as per your requirements.

Please note that the default value for recordContents.podLabels is false, which indicates source and destination Pod labels will not be included in the flow records exported to flowCollector and clickHouse. If you would like to include them, you can modify the value to true.

Please note that the default value for apiServer.apiPort is 10348, which is the port used to expose the Flow Aggregator’s APIServer. Please modify the parameters as per your requirements.

Please note that the default value for clickHouse.commitInterval is 8s, which is based on experiment results to achieve best ClickHouse write performance and data retention. Based on ClickHouse recommendation for best performance, this interval is required be no shorter than 1s. Also note that flow aggregator has a cache limit of ~500k records for ClickHouse-Grafana collector. If clickHouse.commitInterval is set to a value too large, there’s a risk of losing records.

IPFIX Information Elements (IEs) in an Aggregated Flow Record

In addition to IPFIX information elements provided in the above section, the Flow Aggregator adds the following fields to the flow records.

IEs from Antrea IE Registry

Supported capabilities

Storage of Flow Records

Flow Aggregator stores the received flow records from Antrea Agents in a hash map, where the flow key is 5-tuple of a network connection. 5-tuple consists of Source IP, Destination IP, Source Port, Destination Port and Transport protocol. Therefore, Flow Aggregator maintains one flow record for any given connection, and this flow record gets updated till the connection in the Kubernetes cluster becomes invalid.

Correlation of Flow Records

In the case of inter-Node flows, there are two flow records, one from the source Node, where the flow originates from, and another one from the destination Node, where the destination Pod resides. Both the flow records contain incomplete information as mentioned here. Flow Aggregator provides support for the correlation of the flow records from the source Node and the destination Node, and it exports a single flow record with complete information for both inter-Node and intra-Node flows.

Aggregation of Flow Records

Flow Aggregator aggregates the flow records that belong to a single connection. As part of aggregation, fields such as flow timestamps, flow statistics etc. are updated. For the purpose of updating flow statistics fields, Flow Aggregator introduces the new fields in Antrea Enterprise IPFIX registry corresponding to the Source Node and Destination Node, so that flow statistics from different Nodes can be preserved.

Antctl support

antctl can access the Flow Aggregator API to dump flow records and print metrics about flow record processing. Refer to the antctl documentation for more information.

Quick deployment

If you would like to quickly try Network Flow Visibility feature, you can deploy Antrea, the Flow Aggregator Service and the ELK Flow Collector on the Vagrant setup. You can use the following command:

./infra/vagrant/provision.sh
./infra/vagrant/push_antrea.sh --flow-collector ELK

If you would like to deploy elastic search with high resources, you can change the ES_JAVA_OPTS in the ELK Flow Collector configuration according to the guide. A larger heap size, like -Xms1g -Xmx2g, requires the Vagrant Nodes to have higher memory than default. In this case, we need to provision the Nodes with the --large option as with the following command:

./infra/vagrant/provision.sh --large
./infra/vagrant/push_antrea.sh --flow-collector ELK

Alternatively, given any external IPFIX flow collector, you can deploy Antrea and the Flow Aggregator Service on a default Vagrant setup by running the following commands:

./infra/vagrant/provision.sh
./infra/vagrant/push_antrea.sh --flow-collector <externalFlowCollectorAddress>

Flow Collectors

Here we list three choices the external configured flow collector: go-ipfix collector, Grafana flow collector and ELK flow collector. For each collector, we introduce how to deploy it and how to output or visualize the collected flow records information.

Go-ipfix Collector

Deployment Steps

The go-ipfix collector can be built from go-ipfix library. It is used to collect, decode and log the IPFIX records.

• To deploy a released version of the go-ipfix collector, please choose one deployment manifest from the list of releases (supported after v0.5.2). For any given release (e.g. v0.5.2), you can deploy the collector as follows:

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/vmware/go-ipfix/releases/download/<TAG>/ipfix-collector.yaml

• To deploy the latest version of the go-ipfix collector (built from the main branch), use the checked-in deployment manifest:

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vmware/go-ipfix/main/build/yamls/ipfix-collector.yaml

Go-ipfix collector also supports customization on its parameters: port and protocol. Please follow the go-ipfix documentation to configure those parameters if needed.

Output Flow Records

To output the flow records collected by the go-ipfix collector, use the command below:

kubectl logs <ipfix-collector-pod-name> -n ipfix

Grafana Flow Collector

Grafana Flow Collector feature is only available for releases starting from Antrea v1.6.

Purpose

Antrea supports sending IPFIX flow records through the Flow Exporter and Flow Aggregator feature described above. The Grafana Flow Collector works as the visualization tool for flow records and flow-related information. We use ClickHouse as the data storage, which collects flow records data from the Flow Aggregator and load the data to Grafana. This document provides the guidelines for deploying the Grafana Flow Collector with support for Antrea-specific IPFIX fields in a Kubernetes cluster.

About Grafana and ClickHouse

Grafana is an open-source platform for monitoring and observability. Grafana allows you to query, visualize, alert on and understand your metrics. ClickHouse is an open-source, high performance columnar OLAP database management system for real-time analytics using SQL. We use ClickHouse as the data storage, and use Grafana as the data visualization and monitoring tool.

Deployment Steps

To deploy the Grafana Flow Collector, the first step is to install the ClickHouse Operator, which creates, configures and manages ClickHouse clusters. Check the homepage for more information about the ClickHouse Operator. Current checked-in yaml is based on their v0.18.2 released version. Running the following command will install ClickHouse Operator into kube-system Namespace.

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/antrea-io/antrea/main/build/yamls/clickhouse-operator-install-bundle.yaml

To deploy a released version of the Grafana Flow Collector, find a deployment manifest from the list of releases. For any given release (v1.6.0 or later version), run the following command:

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/antrea-io/antrea/releases/download/<TAG>/flow-visibility.yml

To deploy the latest version of the Grafana Flow Collector (built from the main branch), use the checked-in deployment yaml:

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/antrea-io/antrea/main/build/yamls/flow-visibility.yml

Grafana is exposed through a NodePort Service by default in flow-visibility.yml. If the given K8s cluster supports LoadBalancer Services, Grafana can be exposed through a LoadBalancer Service by changing the grafana Service type in the manifest like below.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: grafana
  namespace: flow-visibility
spec:
  ports:
  - port: 3000
    protocol: TCP
    targetPort: http-grafana
  selector:
    app: grafana
  sessionAffinity: None
  type: LoadBalancer

Please refer to the Flow Aggregator Configuration to learn about the ClickHouse configuration options.

Run the following command to check if ClickHouse and Grafana are deployed properly:

kubectl get all -n flow-visibility                                                               

The expected results will be like:

NAME                                  READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
pod/chi-clickhouse-clickhouse-0-0-0   2/2     Running   0          1m
pod/grafana-5c6c5b74f7-x4v5b          1/1     Running   0          1m

NAME                                    TYPE           CLUSTER-IP       EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)                         AGE
service/chi-clickhouse-clickhouse-0-0   ClusterIP      None             <none>        8123/TCP,9000/TCP,9009/TCP      1m
service/clickhouse-clickhouse           ClusterIP      10.102.124.56    <none>        8123/TCP,9000/TCP               1m
service/grafana                         NodePort       10.97.171.150    <none>        3000:31171/TCP                  1m

NAME                      READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
deployment.apps/grafana   1/1     1            1           1m

NAME                                 DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   AGE
replicaset.apps/grafana-5c6c5b74f7   1         1         1       1m

NAME                                             READY   AGE
statefulset.apps/chi-clickhouse-clickhouse-0-0   1/1     1m

Run the following commands to print the IP of the workder Node and the NodePort that Grafana is listening on:

NODE_NAME=$(kubectl get pod -l app=grafana -n flow-visibility -o jsonpath='{.items[0].spec.nodeName}')
NODE_IP=$(kubectl get nodes ${NODE_NAME} -o jsonpath='{.status.addresses[0].address}')
GRAFANA_NODEPORT=$(kubectl get svc grafana -n flow-visibility -o jsonpath='{.spec.ports[*].nodePort}')
echo "=== Grafana Service is listening on ${NODE_IP}:${GRAFANA_NODEPORT} ==="

You can now open the Grafana dashboard in the browser using http://[NodeIP]:[NodePort]. You should be able to see a Grafana login page. Login credentials:

• username: admin
• password: admin

To stop the Grafana Flow Collector, run the following commands:

kubectl delete -f flow-visibility.yml
kubectl delete -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/antrea-io/antrea/main/build/yamls/clickhouse-operator-install-bundle.yaml -n kube-system

Credentials Configuration

ClickHouse credentials are specified in flow-visibility.yml as a Secret named clickhouse-secret.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: clickhouse-secret
  namespace: flow-visibility
stringData:
  password: clickhouse_operator_password
  username: clickhouse_operator
type: Opaque

If the username clickhouse_operator has been changed, please update the following section accordingly.

apiVersion: "clickhouse.altinity.com/v1"
kind: "ClickHouseInstallation"
metadata:
  name: clickhouse
  labels:
    app: clickhouse
spec:
  configuration:
    users:
      # replace clickhouse_operator by [new_username]
      clickhouse_operator/k8s_secret_password: flow-visibility/clickhouse-secret/password
      clickhouse_operator/networks/ip: "::/0"

ClickHouse credentials are also specified in flow-aggregator.yml as a Secret named clickhouse-secret as shown below. Please also make the corresponding changes.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  labels:
    app: flow-aggregator
  name: clickhouse-secret
  namespace: flow-aggregator
stringData:
  password: clickhouse_operator_password
  username: clickhouse_operator
type: Opaque

Grafana login credentials are specified in flow-visibility.yml as a Secret named grafana-secret.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: grafana-secret
  namespace: flow-visibility
stringData:
  admin-password: admin
  admin-username: admin
type: Opaque

We recommend changing all the credentials above if you are going to run the Flow Collector in production.

ClickHouse Configuration

The ClickHouse database can be accessed through the Service clickhouse-clickhouse. The Pod exposes HTTP port at 8123 and TCP port at 9000 by default. The ports are specified in flow-visibility.yml as serviceTemplates of a ClickHouseInstallation resource. To use other ports, please update the following section.

serviceTemplates:
  - name: service-template
    spec:
      ports:
        - name: http
          port: 8123
        - name: tcp
          port: 9000

This Service is used by the Flow Aggregator and Grafana.

• If you have changed the HTTP port, please update the url of a ConfigMap named grafana-datasource-provider in flow-visibility.yml.

• If you have changed the TCP port, please update the databaseURL following Flow Aggregator Configuration, and also update the jsonData.port of the grafana-datasource-provider ConfigMap.

apiVersion: v1
data:
  datasource_provider.yml: |
    apiVersion: 1
    datasources:
      - name: ClickHouse
        type: grafana-clickhouse-datasource
        access: proxy
        url: http://clickhouse-clickhouse.flow-visibility.svc:8123
        editable: true
        jsonData:
          server: clickhouse-clickhouse.flow-visibility.svc
          port: 9000
          username: $CLICKHOUSE_USERNAME
        secureJsonData:
          password: $CLICKHOUSE_PASSWORD    
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: grafana-datasource-provider-h868k56k95
  namespace: flow-visibility

The ClickHouse throughput depends on two factors - the storage size of the ClickHouse and the time interval between the batch commits to the ClickHouse. Larger storage size and longer commit interval provide higher throughput.

Grafana flow collector supports the ClickHouse in-memory deployment with limited storage size. This is specified in flow-visibility.yml under the clickhouse resource of kind: ClickHouseInstallation. The default value of storage size for the ClickHouse server is 8 GiB. Users can expect a linear growth in the ClickHouse throughput when they enlarge the storage size. For development or testing environment, you can decrease the storage size to 2GiB. To deploy the ClickHouse with a different storage size, please modify the sizeLimit in the following section.

- emptyDir:
    medium: Memory
    sizeLimit: 8Gi
  name: clickhouse-storage-volume

The time interval between the batch commits to the ClickHouse is specified in the Flow Aggregator Configuration as commitInterval. The ClickHouse throughput grows sightly when the commit interval grows from 1s to 8s. A commit interval larger than 8s provides little improvement on the throughput.

Pre-built Dashboards

The following dashboards are pre-built and are recommended for Antrea flow visualization. They can be found in the Home page of Grafana, by clicking the Magnifier button on the left menu bar.

Flow Records Dashboard

Flow Records Dashboard displays the number of flow records being captured in the selected time range. The detailed metadata of each of the records can be found in the table below.

Flow Records Dashboard provides time-range control. The selected time-range will be applied to all the panels in the dashboard. This feature is also available for all the other pre-built dashboards.

Flow Records Dashboard allows us to add key/value filters that automatically apply to all the panels in the dashboard. This feature is also available for all the other pre-built dashboards.

Besides the dashboard-wide filter, Flow Records Dashboard also provides column-based filters that apply to each table column.

Pod-to-Pod Flows Dashboard

Pod-to-Pod Flows Dashboard shows cumulative bytes and reverse bytes of Pod-to-Pod traffic in the selected time range, in the form of Sankey diagram. Corresponding source or destination Pod throughput is visualized using the line graphs. Pie charts visualize the cumulative traffic grouped by source or destination Pod Namespace.

Pod-to-External Flows Dashboard

Pod-to-External Flows Dashboard has similar visualization to Pod-to-Pod Flows Dashboard, visualizing the Pod-to-External flows. The destination of a traffic flow is represented by the destination IP address.

Pod-to-Service Flows Dashboard

Pod-to-Service Flows Dashboard shares the similar visualizations with Pod-to-Pod/External Flows Dashboard, visualizing the Pod-to-Service flows. The destination of a traffic is represented by the destination Service metadata.

Node-to-Node Flows Dashboard

Node-to-Node Flows Dashboard visualizes the Node-to-Node traffic, including intra-Node and inter-Node flows. Cumulative bytes are shown in the Sankey diagrams and pie charts, and throughput is shown in the line graphs.

Network-Policy Flows Dashboard

Network-Policy Flows Dashboard visualizes the traffic with NetworkPolicies enforced. Currently we only support the visualization of NetworkPolicies with Allow action.

Dashboards Customization

If you would like to make any changes to any of the pre-built dashboards, or build a new dashboard, please follow this doc on how to build a dashboard.

By clicking on the “Save dashboard” button in the Grafana UI, the changes to the dashboards will be persisted in the Grafana database at runtime, but they will be lost after restarting the Grafana deployment. To restore those changes after a restart, as the first step, you will need to export the dashboard JSON file following the doc, then there are two ways to import the dashboard depending on your needs:

• In the running Grafana UI, manually import the dashboard JSON files.
• If you want the changed dashboards to be automatically provisioned in Grafana like our pre-built dashboards, generate a deployment manifest with the changes by following the steps below:

1. Clone the repository. Exported dashboard JSON files should be placed under antrea/build/yamls/flow-visibility/base/provisioning/dashboards.

2. If a new dashboard is added, edit kustomization.yml by adding the file in the following section:

   - name: grafana-dashboard-config
     files:
     - provisioning/dashboards/flow_records_dashboard.json
     - provisioning/dashboards/pod_to_pod_dashboard.json
     - provisioning/dashboards/pod_to_service_dashboard.json
     - provisioning/dashboards/pod_to_external_dashboard.json
     - provisioning/dashboards/node_to_node_dashboard.json
     - provisioning/dashboards/networkpolicy_allow_dashboard.json
     - provisioning/dashboards/[new_dashboard_name].json
   

3. Generate the new YAML manifest by running:

./hack/generate-manifest-flow-visibility.sh > build/yamls/flow-visibility.yml

ELK Flow Collector (deprecated)

Purpose

Antrea supports sending IPFIX flow records through the Flow Exporter feature described above. The Elastic Stack (ELK Stack) works as the data collector, data storage and visualization tool for flow records and flow-related information. This document provides the guidelines for deploying Elastic Stack with support for Antrea-specific IPFIX fields in a Kubernetes cluster.

About Elastic Stack

Elastic Stack is a group of open source products to help collect, store, search, analyze and visualize data in real time. We will use Logstash, Elasticsearch and Kibana in Antrea flow visualization. Logstash works as data collector to centralize flow records. Logstash Netflow codec plugin supports Netflow v5/v9/v10(IPFIX) protocols for flow data collection. The flow exporter feature in Antrea Agent uses the IPFIX (Netflow v10) protocol to export flow records.

Elasticsearch, as a RESTful search engine, supports storing, searching and indexing records received. Kibana is mainly for data visualization and exploration.

Deployment Steps

If you are looking for steps to deploy the ELK flow collector along with a new Antrea cluster and the Flow Aggregator Service, then please refer to the quick deployment section.

The following steps will deploy the ELK flow collector on an existing Kubernetes cluster, which uses Antrea as the CNI. First step is to fetch the necessary resources from the Antrea repository. You can either clone the entire repo or download the particular folder using the subversion(svn) utility. If the deployed version of Antrea has a release <TAG> (e.g. v0.10.0), then you can use the following command:

git clone --depth 1 --branch <TAG> https://github.com/antrea-io/antrea.git && cd antrea/build/yamls/
or
svn export https://github.com/antrea-io/antrea/tags/<TAG>/build/yamls/elk-flow-collector/

If the deployed version of Antrea is the latest version, i.e., built from the main branch, then you can use the following command:

git clone --depth 1 --branch main https://github.com/antrea-io/antrea.git && cd antrea/build/yamls/
or
svn export https://github.com/antrea-io/antrea/trunk/build/yamls/elk-flow-collector/

To create the required K8s resources in the elk-flow-collector folder and get everything up-and-running, run following commands:

kubectl create namespace elk-flow-collector
kubectl create configmap logstash-configmap -n elk-flow-collector --from-file=./elk-flow-collector/logstash/
kubectl apply -f ./elk-flow-collector/elk-flow-collector.yml -n elk-flow-collector

Please refer to the Flow Aggregator Configuration to configure external flow collector as Logstash Service Cluster IP.

Kibana dashboard is exposed as a Nodeport Service, which can be accessed via http://[NodeIP]: 30007. elk-flow-collector/kibana.ndjson is an auto-generated reusable file containing pre-built objects for visualizing Pod-to-Pod, Pod-to-Service and Node-to-Node flow records. To import the dashboards into Kibana, go to Management -> Saved Objects and import elk-flow-collector/kibana.ndjson.

Pre-built Dashboards

The following dashboards are pre-built and are recommended for Antrea flow visualization.

Overview

An overview of Pod-based flow records information is provided.

Pod-to-Pod Flows

Pod-to-Pod cumulative Tx and Rx traffic is shown in sankey diagrams. Corresponding source or destination Pod throughput is visualized using line graph.

Pod-to-External Flows

Pod-to-External cumulative Tx and Rx traffic is shown in sankey diagrams. Corresponding source or destination throughput is visualized using line graph.

Pod-to-Service Flows

Pod-to-Service traffic is presented similar to Pod-to-Pod/External traffic. Corresponding source or destination IP addresses is shown in tooltips.

Aggregated Tx and Rx traffic based on destination Service is shown in line graph.

Flow Records

Flow Records dashboard shows the raw flow records over time with support for filters.

Node Throughput

Node Throughput dashboard shows the visualization of inter-Node and intra-Node traffic by aggregating all the Pod traffic per Node.

We also present aggregated Tx and Rx Mbps by Node in heatmap to give a better overview of Node bandwidth consumption.

Network Policy

Network Policy dashboard provides filters over ingress network policy name and namespace, egress network policy name and namespace to view corresponding flow throughput under network policy. Flows are grouped by egress network policies (source) and ingress network policies (destination) in the sankey diagram. When hovering over the flow, it will show corresponding Pod-to-Pod traffic details and network policies.

With filters applied: