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Debugging Gloo Edge

At times you may need to debug Gloo Edge misconfigurations. Gloo Edge is based on Envoy and often times these misconfigurations are observed as a result of behavior seen at the proxy. This guide will help you debug issues with Gloo Edge and Envoy.

The guide is broken into 3 main sections:

Pulling the rip cord

This guide is intended to help you understand where to look if things aren’t working as expected. After going through, if all else fails, you can capture the state of Gloo Edge configurations and logs and join us on our Slack (https://slack.solo.io) and one of our engineers will be able to help:

glooctl debug logs -f gloo-logs.log
glooctl debug yaml -f gloo-yamls.yaml

This will dump all of the relevant configuration into to files, gloo-logs.log and gloo-yamls.yaml which gives a complete picture of your deployment.

General debugging tools and tips

If you’re experiencing unexpected behavior after installing and configuring Gloo Edge, the first thing to do is verify installation and configuration. The fastest way to do that is to run the glooctl check command. This command will go through the deployments, pods and Gloo Edge resources to make sure they’re in a healthy/Accepted/OK status. Typically if there is some problem syncing resources, you’d find an issue here.

glooctl check

Output should be similar to:

Checking deployments... OK
Checking pods... OK
Checking upstreams... OK
Checking upstream groups... OK
Checking secrets... OK
Checking virtual services... OK
Checking gateways... OK
Checking proxies... OK
No problems detected.

The VirtualService, Gateway, and Proxy resource

One of the first places to look is the Gloo Edge configurations: VirtualService , Gateway , and Proxy . For example, when you specify routing configurations, you do that in VirtualService resources. Ultimately, these resources get compiled down into the Proxy resource which ends up being the source of truth of the configuration for the control plane that is served over xDS to Envoy. Your best bet is to start by checking the Proxy resource:

kubectl get proxy gateway-proxy -n gloo-system -o yaml

This combines both Gateway and VirtualService resources into a single document. Here you can verify whether your VirtualService or Gateway configurations were properly picked up. If not, you should check the gateway and gloo pods for error logs (see next section).

Upstreams

When using dynamic Upstream discovery (default, out of the box), and making changes to those upstreams (ie, adding TLS), you may end up with misconfigured or Rejected Upstreams that can cause resources that depend on them to show failures (ie, VirtualServices, RouteTable, etc). To determine whether your Upstreams are in a healthy state, run the following and examine the STATUS column:

glooctl get upstreams

Debugging the data plane

Gloo Edge is based on Envoy proxy which means there is a lot of generic Envoy debugging knowledge that is applicable to Gloo Edge. When you find unexpected behaviors with your request handling, here are a few areas to look in Envoy that can aid in debugging. Note, we’ve created some convenience tooling in the glooctl CLI tool which is tremendously helpful here.

Dumping Envoy configuration

If the Proxy resource that gets compiled from your VirtualService and Gateway resources looks okay, your next “source of truth” is what Envoy sees. Ultimately, the proxy behavior is based on what configuration is served to Envoy, so this is a top candidate to see what’s actually happening.

You can easily see the Envoy proxy configuration by running the following command:

glooctl proxy dump

This dumps the entire Envoy configuration including all static and dynamic resources. Typically at the bottom you can see the VirtualHost and Route sections to verify your settings were picked up correctly.

Viewing Envoy logs

If things look okay (within your ability to tell), another good place to look is the Envoy proxy logs. You can very quickly turn on debug logging to Envoy as well as tail the logs with this handy glooctl command:

glooctl proxy logs -f

When you have the logging window up, send requests through to the proxy and you can get some very detailed debugging logging going through the log tail.

Additionally, you can enable access logging to dump specific parts of the request into the logs. Please see the doc on access logging to configure that.

Viewing Envoy stats

Envoy collects a wealth of statistics and makes them available for metric-collection systems like Prometheus, Statsd, and Datadog (to name a few). You can also very quickly get access to the stats from the cli:

glooctl proxy stats

All else with Envoy: bootstrap and Admin

There may be more limited times where you need direct access to the Envoy Admin API. You can view both the Envoy bootstrap config as well as access the Admin API with the following commands:

kubectl exec -it -n gloo-system deploy/gateway-proxy \
-- cat /etc/envoy/envoy.yaml

You can port-forward the Envoy Admin API similarly:

kubectl port-forward -n gloo-system deploy/gateway-proxy 19000:19000

That way you can curl localhost:19000 and get access to the Envoy Admin API.

Debugging the control plane

The Gloo Edge control plane is made up of the following components:

NAME                             READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
discovery-857796b8fb-gcphh       1/1     Running   0          15h
gateway-5d7dd58d5f-8z48k         1/1     Running   0          15h
gateway-proxy-8689c55fb8-7swfq   1/1     Running   0          15h
gloo-66fb8974c9-8sgll            1/1     Running   0          15h

You will see more components for the Enterprise installation

NAME                                                  READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
api-server-8575657b8-sqdnv                            3/3     Running   0          7m22s
discovery-5bbbc474b9-kvhkb                            1/1     Running   0          7m22s
extauth-6f976948cf-q6hbf                              1/1     Running   0          7m21s
gateway-79cb559db-d9lx2                               1/1     Running   0          7m22s
gateway-proxy-79cb47d5b6-6qmph                        1/1     Running   0          7m22s
gloo-79d584c959-x8rk2                                 1/1     Running   0          2m29s
glooe-grafana-f58f664c-84txh                          1/1     Running   0          7m22s
glooe-prometheus-kube-state-metrics-64fd97986-fb2wl   1/1     Running   0          7m22s
glooe-prometheus-server-694dc99cd4-k6g75              2/2     Running   0          7m22s
observability-6df4b5d9fd-pvlbb                        1/1     Running   0          7m22s
rate-limit-598fbc996d-skfmz                           1/1     Running   1          7m21s
redis-5bf75869f4-4v2j7                                1/1     Running   0          7m22s

Each component keeps logs about the sync loops it does (syncing with various environment signals like the Kube API, or Consul, etc). You can get all of logs for the components with the following command:

glooctl debug logs

This returns a LOT of logging. You can save the logs off by passing in a filename:

glooctl debug logs -f gloo.log

If you just want to see errors (most useful):

glooctl debug logs --errors-only

Likely you just want to see each individual components logs. You can use kubectl logs command for that. For example, to see the gloo components logs:

kubectl logs -f -n gloo-system -l gloo=gloo

Changing logging Levels and more

Each Gloo Edge control plane component comes with a optional debug port that can be enabled with the START_STATS_SERVER environment variable. To get access to it, you can port-forward to it with Kubernetes like this:

kubectl port-forward  -n gloo-system deploy/gloo  9091:9091

Now you can navigate to http://localhost:9091 and you get a simple page with some additional endpoints:

With these endpoints, you can profile the behavior of the component, adjust its logging, view the prometheus-style telemetry signals, as well as view tracing spans within the process. This is a very handy page to understand the behavior of a particular component.

Declaratively setting log levels on start

Setting the LOG_LEVEL environment variable within gloo, discovery, gateway or gateway proxy deployments will change the level at which the stats server logs. The default log level for the stats server is info.

Other acceptable log levels for Gloo Edge components are:

With Helm installations, these can be set for you by providing the desired level as a value for the logLevel key for each of those components. You can also define the Envoy log level by setting the envoyLogLevel value on gateway proxies.

All else fails

Again, if all else fails, you can capture the state of Gloo Edge configurations and logs and join us on our Slack (https://slack.solo.io) and one of our engineers will be able to help:

glooctl debug logs -f gloo-logs.log
glooctl debug yaml -f gloo-yamls.yaml