Kubernetes Network Problem Detector

A simple tool to help debug connectivity issues within a Pod or from a specific host in a live Kubernetes cluster easily with a single command. Works with both IPv4 as well as IPv6 K8s stacks.

When connectivity between two applications within a Kubernetes cluster does not work as expected, it requires specific troubleshooting steps in real time to find the issue. Often times, this involves using network tools such as ping, tcpdump, traceroute, nslookup and others to vaildate the plumbing; both within the source Pod as well as on the host that the pod is running.

It gets harder when the application Pod does not have an interactive shell to log into or the specific network tools installed as part of the image. Netshoot helps by providing a docker image with all of the networking tools necessary to manually debug. Most other tools set up test deployments and run network health checks via those deployments rather than using the actual Pods/Service that is exhibiting network issues as source/destination.

k8snetlook aims to automate some of the basic mundane debugging steps in a live k8s cluster. It hopes to help minimize the need to manually intervene and debug the network at the get-go.

k8snetlook needs kubeconfig to be supplied to it using the -config flag or by exporting KUBECONFIG enviroment variable. The tool can be used:

1. to run host level checks only, use the host subcommand
2. to run pod level checks, use the the pod subcommand and the required arguments like PodName with it. See k8snetlook pod --help for more information. Pod checks will also run host checks.

Command usage examples

To run host checks alone

k8snetlook host -config /etc/kubernetes/admin.yaml

To run Pod check which automatically runs host checks as well

k8snetlook pod -config /etc/kubernetes/admin.yaml -srcpodname bbox-74d847cb47-xtpdn -srcpodns default -dstpodname nginx-6db489d4b7-9l264 -dstpodns default --externalip 8.8.8.8

• Needs to be run as root. This is because raw sockets are needed (CAP_NET_RAW privilege) to programmatically implement the ping functionality. udp socket could be used to remove need for this requirement (TBD?)

• The binary is run on the host where the Pod with connectivity issues are present

• If the tool isn't able to initialize k8s client using specified kubeconfig, the tool will fail (FUTURE? run other tests that don't need k8s information)

Docker image is hosted at sarun87/k8snetlook:<release_tag>. Or build your own docker image using make docker-image command

• Command to run the tool as a docker container

docker run --privileged --pid=host --net=host -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v $KUBECONFIG:/kubeconfig.yaml sarun87/k8snetlook:v0.3 /k8snetlook host -config /kubeconfig.yaml

Notes:

• The above command assumes that the $KUBECONFIG environment variable is pointing to a valid kubeconfig & mounts it within the container
• Mounts docker socket needed interact with docker daemon.
• Needs privileged context to be set to access pod's network namespace.
• --net=host: Should run in host network namespace, --pid=host: Run in host pid (proc & sys paths are mounted which is needed to obtain handles to Pod's network namespace)

64-bit linux binary is available for download from the Releases page.

• download binary to a host

wget https://github.com/sarun87/k8snetlook/releases/download/v0.3/k8snetlook

• Make the downloaded file executable

chmod u+x k8snetlook

• Run tool using sudo or as root

./k8snetlook
'host' or 'pod' subcommand expected

usage: k8snetlook subcommand [sub-command-options] [-config path-to-kube-config]

valid subcommands
  pod       Debug Pod & host networking
  host      Debug host networking only

There are advantages & disadvantages to running a K8s network debugging tool within k8s. Ease of deployment and not requiring ssh access to the host running the problem pod are clear advantages. But the underlying problem could prevent deployment of k8snetlook on the host (Eg: communication from the host to k8s api server is down).

The examples folder contains a yaml manifest that creates a K8s Job and runs to completion. All of the required RBAC objets and the Job itself is deployed in the k8snetlook namespace. Steps to run k8snetlook in k8s:

• Change the value of key command under containers section with the required arguments to k8snetlook
• Change the value of key kubernetes.io/hostname under nodeSelector section in the yaml spec to the host on which the problem pod is running. Then run the following commands:
• Apply to cluster using:

kubectl apply -f examples/run-k8s.yaml

• Check results by pulling logs of the completed job

kubectl -n k8snetlook get pods

kubectl -n k8snetlook logs <pod-name>

• Delete k8snetlook after the run

kubectl delete -f examples/run-k8s.yaml

• To rerun the test, delete k8snetlook and re-apply.

By having to initialize a Kubernetes client-set, the tool intrinsically performs API connectivity check via K8s-apiserver's VIP/External Loadbalancer in case of highly available k8s-apiserver clusters. The tool supports pure IPv6 K8s stack as well as IPv4.

To build tool from source, run make as follows:

make all

The binary named k8snetlook will be built under root-dir/bin/

To clean existing binaries and supporting files, run:

make clean

To speed up development, there is a darwin target defined as well. To build a darwin compatible binary, run:

make k8snetlook-osx

To create a zipped release binary, run:

make release

To create a docker image, run:

make docker-image

PRs welcome :)

• At Kubecon 2021 Arun presented k8snetlook on a 3 node cluster (Vagrant VMs): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BDoxy9h95U.
• We went over k8snetlook recently in an Antrea-LIVE episode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWUwxQ58bEQ on a VMWare Tanzu cluster (Vsphere).