About traffic tapping

A tap server is a simple device that connects directly to your infrastructure and receives copies of actual traffic from your network so that this traffic can be further monitored, analyzed, or tested with.

Considerations

  • Traffic tapping can be applied to a gateway listener by using an HTTPListenerOption resource. As such, traffic tapping is applied to all routes that the gateway listener serves. Tapping traffic for a specific route is not currently supported.

  • You must write your own tap servers. You can find the tap server definitions in the tap-extension-examples repository. To receive tap traces, the tap server must implement the tap service protobuf definitions and be configured to receive data over the gRPC or HTTP protocol.

  • In the current implementation, the data plane buffers all trace data in memory before sending it to the tap server.

  • You cannot tap traffic to a local file.

Before you begin

  1. Follow the Get started guide to install Gloo Gateway, set up a gateway resource, and deploy the httpbin sample app.

  2. Get the external address of the gateway and save it in an environment variable.

      export INGRESS_GW_ADDRESS=$(kubectl get svc -n gloo-system gloo-proxy-http -o jsonpath="{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0]['hostname','ip']}")
echo $INGRESS_GW_ADDRESS  
  
      kubectl port-forward deployment/gloo-proxy-http -n gloo-system 8080:8080

Deploy a tap server

  1. Create the deployment, service, and upstream for the tap server in your cluster.

      kubectl apply -f- <<EOF
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  labels:
    app: sample-tap-server-http
  name: sample-tap-server-http
  namespace: gloo-system
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: sample-tap-server-http
  replicas: 1
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: sample-tap-server-http
    spec:
      containers:
      - image: gcr.io/solo-test-236622/sample-tap-server-http:0.0.2
        name: sample-tap-server-http
        # args: ["-text='Hello World!'"]
        ports:
        - containerPort: 8080
          name: grpc
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: sample-tap-server-http
  namespace: gloo-system
  labels:
    service: sample-tap-server-http
spec:
  ports:
  - port: 8080
    protocol: TCP
  selector:
    app: sample-tap-server-http
---
apiVersion: gloo.solo.io/v1
kind: Upstream
metadata:
  name: sample-tap-server-http
  namespace: gloo-system
spec:
  # useHttp2: true
  static:
    hosts:
    - addr: sample-tap-server-http
      port: 8080
EOF

  2. Verify that the tap server is up and running.

      kubectl get pods -n gloo-system | grep tap

Set up traffic tapping

  1. Create an HTTPListenerOption resource to configure traffic tapping for the HTTP listener on the gateway. In the following example, you instruct Gloo Gateway to tap all incoming traffic on the gateway and to send it to the tap server that you previously configured by using the HTTP protocol.

      kubectl apply -f- <<EOF
apiVersion: gateway.solo.io/v1
kind: HttpListenerOption
metadata:
  name: tapping
  namespace: gloo-system
spec:
  targetRefs:
  - group: gateway.networking.k8s.io
    kind: Gateway
    name: http
  options:
    tap:
      sinks:
      - httpService:
          tapServer:
            name: sample-tap-server-http
            namespace: gloo-system
          timeout: '20s'
EOF

  2. In a terminal window, tail the logs of the tap server.

      kubectl -n gloo-system logs deployments/sample-tap-server-http -f

  3. In another terminal window, send a request to the httpbin app.

      curl -vik http://$INGRESS_GW_ADDRESS:8080/status/200 -H "host: www.example.com:8080"
  
      curl -vik localhost:8080/status/200 -H "host: www.example.com"

  4. Go back to the logs of the tap server and verify that you can see the request to the httpbin app.

    Example output:

      2024/06/25 03:12:44 got a request on /
2024/06/25 03:12:45 Message contents were: {
  "trace_data": {
    "Trace": {
      "HttpBufferedTrace": {
        "request": {
          "headers": [
             {
               "key": ":authority",
               "value": "www.example.com:8080"
             },
             {
               "key": ":path",
               "value": "/status/200"
             },
             {
               "key": ":method",
               "value": "GET"
             },
             {
               "key": ":scheme",
               "value": "http"
             },
             {
               "key": "user-agent",
               "value": "curl/7.77.0"
             },
             {
               "key": "accept",
               "value": "*/*"
             },
             {
               "key": "x-forwarded-proto",
               "value": "http"
             },
             {
               "key": "x-request-id",
               "value": "87409d69-7c6d-4ce0-9d5a-a9050f960a60"
             },
             {
               "key": "x-envoy-expected-rq-timeout-ms",
               "value": "15000"
             }
         ]
         },
         "response": {
         "headers": [
             {
               "key": ":status",
               "value": "200"
             },
             {
               "key": "access-control-allow-credentials",
               "value": "true"
             },
             {
               "key": "access-control-allow-origin",
               "value": "*"
             },
             {
               "key": "date",
               "value": "Tue, 25 Jun 2024 03:12:44 GMT"
             },
             {
               "key": "content-length",
               "value": "0"
             },
             {
               "key": "x-envoy-upstream-service-time",
               "value": "2"
             },
             {
               "key": "server",
               "value": "envoy"
             },
             {
               "key": "x-envoy-decorator-operation",
               "value": "httpbin.httpbin.svc.cluster.local:8000/*"
             }
         ]
     }

Clean up

You can optionally remove the resources that you created as part of this guide.

  kubectl delete deployment sample-tap-server-http -n gloo-system
kubectl delete service sample-tap-server-http -n gloo-system
kubectl delete httplisteneroption tapping -n gloo-system