Traffic tap

Traffic tap enables you to monitor live access logs of the Istio sidecar proxies.

Getting started

• Follow the getting started guide to install Backyards.
• Expose the Backyards ingress locally by running backyards dashboard.

• # install dependencies
  npm i
  
  # start the application
  npm start

• Open the application at http://127.0.0.1:3000/. NOTE: npm start opens the application at http://localhost:3000/ but since the auth cookie is not set there it will fail to communicate with the backend so make sure to use the first link.
• Generate some traffic e.g. by using backyards demoapp load or inspect the traffic from backyards-system.

Features

• Filtering accessLogs by namespaces, resource names and destination resources. Validate filters and clear incorrect combinations.
• Linkable filter configuration (filters are persisted in the URL as query params).
• Start/stop the accessLog stream.
• Show the accessLogs matching the selected resources.
• View the details of a specific accessLog entry.
• Automatic reconnect in case of network failures.

Known issues

• Network issues only detected once: if the connection to the backend service fails an error message is shown for the first time but doesn’t for the second time. This is an issue with @apollo/react-hooks as it doesn’t update the error property for the second time. NOTE: this doesn't affect the automatic reconnect functionality as the app always tries to reconnect on network failures.

• High network traffic makes the UI less responsive: if there is too much traffic going on then the browser might have hard time to process all the accessLogs and render them on the screen. Tip: Consider using more granular filters.
  This issue could be solved by introducing a WebWorker and offloading the websocket communication to it. I would also have to introduce a global state layer for that (e.g. by using redux) and update the store in every 50-100 ms that would trigger the rerender of the data table.

Testing

Due to time limitations testing is missing.