Monitoring network performance on Amazon EKS using AWS Managed Open-Source Services

Monitoring network performance on Amazon EKS using AWS Managed Open-Source Services Architecture diagram Walkthrough Prerequisites Setup Network performance testing and visualization: Key considerations Managing dashboards and data sources with Grafana Operator Using ADOT for telemetry collection Cleanup Conclusion About the authors As organizations scale their microservices architectures on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) , platform and development teams face mounting challenges in monitoring network performance across distributed workloads. While VPC Flow Logs provide visibility into IP traffic, they lack the Kubernetes context needed to correlate network flows to specific pods, services, and namespaces. This makes it difficult to diagnose connectivity issues, identify packet drops, or investigate security incidents. Platform teams struggle to answer critical questions such as: “ Which services are communicating with each other? Where are the latency bottlenecks? Are there any security policy violations?” Without Kubernetes-enriched network telemetry integrated into their observability and Security information and event management (SIEM) systems, teams spend excessive time troubleshooting network-related issues and lack the real-time visibility needed to ensure optimal performance and security across their EKS environments. In this post, we will discuss how to monitor the network performance of your workloads running in Amazon EKS clusters using new advanced network observability features which are a part of Container Network Observability in EKS. This includes capturing network performance metrics and exporting them to AWS Managed Open-Source services such as Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus , Amazon Managed Grafana , etc. You can leverage the same approach to integrate with third-party observability solutions such as Datadog, New Relic, etc. , or self-managed open-source tools like Prometheus. Amazon EKS introduced new advanced network observability features that give you the ability to dynamically visualize and quickly understand the landscape, performance and security of the network environment of your Kubernetes clusters. At a cluster level, it provides you with a Service Map that depicts end-to-end visibility of network traffic flows for workloads in the cluster (east ↔ west traffic). Alongside this, you can access Network Flow Analysis which provide more granular information around application network activity and the network security posture for your workloads. Additionally, you can export Kubernetes-enriched network performance metrics from all your EKS clusters to be analyzed in your preferred monitoring solution or SIEM.