One of the most important things when running applications in an environment like Kubernetes is to have good observability and deep insight of their performance. However, for many applications it can be challenging to update existing applications to provide the observability you need.

Cilium leverages eBPF to provide observability data with Prometheus metrics for your applications without having to modify the application itself.

In this session we will demonstrate how Cilium powered with Hubble and the Grafana LGTM (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, Mimir for Metrics) stack is able to show Service to Service communication, monitor Golden Signals, detect transient network layer issues and identifies problematic API request with transparent tracing.

Using a demo application we will demonstrate performance and metrics for that application and how the metrics change when increasing request volumes. We will show how a new configuration of our application introduces error rates and request duration.

Finally we will demonstrate how tracing headers for the application can be exported with the Hubble HTTP metrics as Exemplars to link metrics to traces in Grafana to monitor each HTTP Request and its duration using Tempo.

The audience will walk away with knowledge how to monitor service-to-service connectivity, collect tracing data and golden metrics using standard Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry with Cilium and eBPF.