Hubble is a fully distributed networking and security observability platform for cloud native workloads. Hubble is open source software and built on top of Cilium and eBPF to enable deep visibility into the communication and behavior of services as well as the networking infrastructure in a completely transparent manner.

Hubble can answer questions such as:

Service dependencies & communication map:

What services are communicating with each other? How frequently? What does the service dependency graph look like?
What HTTP calls are being made? What Kafka topics does a service consume from or produce to?

Operational monitoring & alerting:

Is any network communication failing? Why is communication failing? Is it DNS? Is it an application or network problem? Is the communication broken on layer 4 (TCP) or layer 7 (HTTP)?
Which services have experienced a DNS resolution problems in the last 5 minutes? Which services have experienced an interrupted TCP connection recently or have seen connections timing out? What is the rate of unanswered TCP SYN requests?

Application monitoring:

What is the rate of 5xx or 4xx HTTP response codes for a particular service or across all clusters?
What is the 95th and 99th percentile latency between HTTP requests and responses in my cluster? Which services are performing the worst? What is the latency between two services?

Security observability:

Which services had connections blocked due to network policy? What services have been accessed from outside the cluster? Which services have resolved a particular DNS name?

Why Hubble?

The Linux kernel technology eBPF is enabling visibility into systems and applications at a granularity and efficiency that was not possible before. It does so in a completely transparent way, without requiring the application to change or for the application to hide information. By building on top of Cilium, Hubble can leverage eBPF for visibility. By relying on eBPF, all visibility is programmable and allows for a dynamic approach that minimizes overhead while providing deep and detailed visibility where required. Hubble has been created and specifically designed to make best use of these new eBPF powers.

Features

Service Dependency Graph

Troubleshooting microservices application connectivity is a challenging task. Simply looking at "kubectl get pods" does not indicate dependencies between each service or external APIs or databases.

Hubble enables zero-effort automatic discovery of the service dependency graph for Kubernetes Clusters at L3/L4 and even L7, allowing user-friendly visualization and filtering of those dataflows as a Service Map.

See Hubble Service Map Tutorial for more examples.

Metrics & Monitoring

The metrics and monitoring functionality provides an overview of the state of systems and allow to recognize patterns indicating failure and other scenarios that require action. The following is a short list of example metrics, for a more detailed list of examples, see the Metrics Documentation

Networking Behavior

Network Policy Observation

HTTP Request/Response Rate & Latency

DNS Request/Response Monitoring

Flow Visibility

Flow visibility provides visibility into flow information on the network and application protocol level. This enables visibility into individual TCP connections, DNS queries, HTTP requests, Kafka communication, and much more.

DNS Resolution

Identifying pods which have received DNS response indicating failure:

hubble observe --since=1m -t l7 -j \
   | jq 'select(.l7.dns.rcode==3) | .destination.namespace + "/" + .destination.pod_name' \
   | sort | uniq -c | sort -r
  42 "starwars/jar-jar-binks-6f5847c97c-qmggv"

Successful query & response:

starwars/x-wing-bd86d75c5-njv8k            kube-system/coredns-5c98db65d4-twwdg      DNS Query deathstar.starwars.svc.cluster.local. A
kube-system/coredns-5c98db65d4-twwdg       starwars/x-wing-bd86d75c5-njv8k           DNS Answer "10.110.126.213" TTL: 3 (Query deathstar.starwars.svc.cluster.local. A)

Non-existent domain:

starwars/jar-jar-binks-789c4b695d-ltrzm    kube-system/coredns-5c98db65d4-f4m8n      DNS Query unknown-galaxy.svc.cluster.local. A
starwars/jar-jar-binks-789c4b695d-ltrzm    kube-system/coredns-5c98db65d4-f4m8n      DNS Query unknown-galaxy.svc.cluster.local. AAAA
kube-system/coredns-5c98db65d4-twwdg       starwars/jar-jar-binks-789c4b695d-ltrzm   DNS Answer RCode: Non-Existent Domain TTL: 4294967295 (Query unknown-galaxy.starwars.svc.cluster.local. A)
kube-system/coredns-5c98db65d4-twwdg       starwars/jar-jar-binks-789c4b695d-ltrzm   DNS Answer RCode: Non-Existent Domain TTL: 4294967295 (Query unknown-galaxy.starwars.svc.cluster.local. AAAA)

HTTP Protocol

Successful request & response with latency information:

starwars/x-wing-bd86d75c5-njv8k:53410      starwars/deathstar-695d8f7ddc-lvj84:80    HTTP/1.1 GET http://deathstar/
starwars/deathstar-695d8f7ddc-lvj84:80     starwars/x-wing-bd86d75c5-njv8k:53410     HTTP/1.1 200 1ms (GET http://deathstar/)

TCP/UDP Packets

Successful TCP connection:

starwars/x-wing-bd86d75c5-njv8k:53410      starwars/deathstar-695d8f7ddc-lvj84:80    TCP Flags: SYN
deathstar.starwars.svc.cluster.local:80    starwars/x-wing-bd86d75c5-njv8k:53410     TCP Flags: SYN, ACK
starwars/x-wing-bd86d75c5-njv8k:53410      starwars/deathstar-695d8f7ddc-lvj84:80    TCP Flags: ACK, FIN
deathstar.starwars.svc.cluster.local:80    starwars/x-wing-bd86d75c5-njv8k:53410     TCP Flags: ACK, FIN

Connection timeout:

starwars/r2d2-6694d57947-xwhtz:60948   deathstar.starwars.svc.cluster.local:8080     TCP Flags: SYN
starwars/r2d2-6694d57947-xwhtz:60948   deathstar.starwars.svc.cluster.local:8080     TCP Flags: SYN
starwars/r2d2-6694d57947-xwhtz:60948   deathstar.starwars.svc.cluster.local:8080     TCP Flags: SYN

Network Policy Behavior

Denied connection attempt:

starwars/enterprise-5775b56c4b-thtwl:37800   starwars/deathstar-695d8f7ddc-lvj84:80(http)   Policy denied (L3)   TCP Flags: SYN
starwars/enterprise-5775b56c4b-thtwl:37800   starwars/deathstar-695d8f7ddc-lvj84:80(http)   Policy denied (L3)   TCP Flags: SYN
starwars/enterprise-5775b56c4b-thtwl:37800   starwars/deathstar-695d8f7ddc-lvj84:80(http)   Policy denied (L3)   TCP Flags: SYN

Getting Started

See the links below to get started. While doing so, make sure to join the #hubble channel on the Cilium Slack to share your experiences with others exploring Hubble and to provide feedback to the Hubble development team.

Announcing Hubble - Network, Service & Security Observability for Kubernetes