The API Traffic Viewer for Kubernetes

A simple-yet-powerful API traffic viewer for Kubernetes enabling you to view all API communication between microservices to help your debug and troubleshoot regressions.

Think TCPDump and Wireshark re-invented for Kubernetes.

Features

• Simple and powerful CLI
• Monitoring network traffic in real-time. Supported protocols:
  • HTTP/1.x (REST, GraphQL, SOAP, etc.)
  • HTTP/2 (gRPC)
  • AMQP (RabbitMQ, Apache Qpid, etc.)
  • Apache Kafka
  • Redis
• Works with Kubernetes APIs. No installation or code instrumentation
• Rich filtering

Requirements

A Kubernetes server version of 1.16.0 or higher is required.

Download

Download Mizu for your platform and operating system

Latest Stable Release

• for MacOS - Intel

curl -Lo mizu \
https://github.com/up9inc/mizu/releases/latest/download/mizu_darwin_amd64 \
&& chmod 755 mizu

• for Linux - Intel 64bit

curl -Lo mizu \
https://github.com/up9inc/mizu/releases/latest/download/mizu_linux_amd64 \
&& chmod 755 mizu

SHA256 checksums are available on the Releases page

Development (unstable) Build

Pick one from the Releases page

How to Run

1. Find pods you'd like to tap to in your Kubernetes cluster
2. Run mizu tap or mizu tap PODNAME
3. Open browser on http://localhost:8899 or as instructed in the CLI
4. Watch the API traffic flowing
5. Type ^C to stop

Examples

Run mizu help for usage options

To tap all pods in current namespace -

 $ kubectl get pods 
 NAME                            READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
 carts-66c77f5fbb-fq65r          2/2     Running   0          20m
 catalogue-5f4cb7cf5-7zrmn       2/2     Running   0          20m
 front-end-649fc5fd6-kqbtn       2/2     Running   0          20m
 ..

 $ mizu tap
 +carts-66c77f5fbb-fq65r
 +catalogue-5f4cb7cf5-7zrmn
 +front-end-649fc5fd6-kqbtn
 Web interface is now available at http://localhost:8899
 ^C

To tap specific pod

 $ kubectl get pods 
 NAME                            READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
 front-end-649fc5fd6-kqbtn       2/2     Running   0          7m
 ..

 $ mizu tap front-end-649fc5fd6-kqbtn
 +front-end-649fc5fd6-kqbtn
 Web interface is now available at http://localhost:8899
 ^C

To tap multiple pods using regex

 $ kubectl get pods 
 NAME                            READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
 carts-66c77f5fbb-fq65r          2/2     Running   0          20m
 catalogue-5f4cb7cf5-7zrmn       2/2     Running   0          20m
 front-end-649fc5fd6-kqbtn       2/2     Running   0          20m
 ..

 $ mizu tap "^ca.*"
 +carts-66c77f5fbb-fq65r
 +catalogue-5f4cb7cf5-7zrmn
 Web interface is now available at http://localhost:8899
 ^C

Configuration

Mizu can optionally work with a config file that can be provided as a CLI argument (using --set config-path=<PATH>) or if not provided, will be stored at ${HOME}/.mizu/config.yaml In case of partial configuration defined, all other fields will be used with defaults
You can always override the defaults or config file with CLI flags

To get the default config params run mizu config
To generate a new config file with default values use mizu config -r

Advanced Usage

Kubeconfig

It is possible to change the kubeconfig path using KUBECONFIG environment variable or the command like flag with --set kube-config-path=<PATH>.
If both are not set - Mizu assumes that configuration is at ${HOME}/.kube/config

Namespace-Restricted Mode

Some users have permission to only manage resources in one particular namespace assigned to them By default mizu tap creates a new namespace mizu for all of its Kubernetes resources. In order to instead install Mizu in an existing namespace, set the mizu-resources-namespace config option

If mizu-resources-namespace is set to a value other than the default mizu, Mizu will operate in a Namespace-Restricted mode. It will only tap pods in mizu-resources-namespace. This way Mizu only requires permissions to the namespace set by mizu-resources-namespace. The user must set the tapped namespace to the same namespace by using the --namespace flag or by setting tap.namespaces in the config file

Setting mizu-resources-namespace=mizu resets Mizu to its default behavior

For detailed list of k8s permissions see PERMISSIONS document

User agent filtering

User-agent filtering (like health checks) - can be configured using command-line options:

$ mizu tap "^ca.*" --set tap.ignored-user-agents=kube-probe --set tap.ignored-user-agents=prometheus
+carts-66c77f5fbb-fq65r
+catalogue-5f4cb7cf5-7zrmn
Web interface is now available at http://localhost:8899
^C

Any request that contains User-Agent header with one of the specified values (kube-probe or prometheus) will not be captured

Traffic validation rules

This feature allows you to define set of simple rules, and test the traffic against them. Such validation may test response for specific JSON fields, headers, etc.

Please see TRAFFIC RULES page for more details and syntax.

OpenAPI Specification (OAS) Contract Monitoring

An OAS/Swagger file can contain schemas under parameters and responses fields. With --contract catalogue.yaml CLI option, you can pass your API description to Mizu and the traffic will automatically be validated against the contracts.

Please see CONTRACT MONITORING page for more details and syntax.

Configure proxy host

By default, mizu will be accessible via local host: 'http://localhost:8899', it is possible to change the host, for instance, to '0.0.0.0' which can grant access via machine IP address. This setting can be changed via command line flag --set tap.proxy-host=<value> or via config file: tap proxy-host: 0.0.0.0 and when changed it will support accessing by IP

Install Mizu standalone

Mizu can be run detached from the cli using the install command: mizu install. This type of mizu instance will run indefinitely in the cluster.

For more information please refer to INSTALL STANDALONE