Cilium Hubble Overview

Cilium Hubble extends Cilium’s eBPF datapath to deliver unparalleled network observability, troubleshooting, and security enforcement for Kubernetes clusters. In this guide, we’ll cover Hubble’s architecture, built-in metrics, UI/CLI tools, and how to integrate with Prometheus and Grafana. Hubble components:

eBPF datapath on each node for flow and event capture
Relay to aggregate data across nodes
Integrations with Prometheus (metrics), Grafana (dashboards, service maps), and Hubble UI/CLI for interactive inspection

The image is a diagram explaining Hubble, a tool built on Cilium (eBPF), highlighting its features like network observation, troubleshooting, and monitoring, with components like Grafana, Prometheus, and Hubble UI/CLI. It shows nodes with pods and integrations for metrics, service maps, and flow inspection.

Built-in Metrics for Prometheus

Hubble exports metrics in the Prometheus OpenMetrics format, making it simple to monitor network health and trigger alerts on key events:

Metric Category	Tracks	Use Case
dns	DNS queries, failures, latencies	Alert on high DNS failure rate
drop	Packet drops by policy or error	Identify unintended policy blocks
tcp	TCP connections, retransmissions, resets	Detect connection instability
flow	Flow counts, throughput, duration	Baseline traffic trends
port-distribution	Top port usage across services	Spot unexpected open ports
icmp	ICMP echo requests and replies	Monitor ping flood or unreachable hosts
httpV2	HTTP/2 metrics with exemplars and label context	Trace request latencies with context labels

Enable only the metrics you need to reduce data volume and improve query performance.

Enabling Hubble Metrics via Helm

When installing or upgrading Cilium with Helm, you can enable Hubble and Prometheus integration in one step:

helm upgrade cilium cilium/cilium --version CILIUM_VERSION \
  --namespace kube-system \
  --reuse-values \
  --set hubble.enabled=true \
  --set hubble.relay.enabled=true \
  --set hubble.ui.enabled=true \
  --set hubble.metrics.enableOpenMetrics=true \
  --set prometheus.enabled=true \
  --set operator.prometheus.enabled=true \
  --set hubble.metrics.enabled="{dns,drop,tcp,flow,port-distribution,icmp,httpV2:exemplar=true;labelsContext=source_ip\,source_namespace\,source_workload\,destination_ip\,destination_namespace\,destination_workload\,traffic_direction}"

Hubble UI and CLI

Hubble offers both a web-based UI and a scriptable CLI, providing deep visibility into service interactions, network flows, and security policy verdicts.

Hubble UI

The Hubble UI delivers interactive dashboards and service maps:

Service Dependency Map
Visualize inter-service communication to spot bottlenecks or misconfigurations.
Flow Table
Inspect individual network flows with source/destination, protocol details, performance metrics, and policy verdicts.
Security Events
Review blocked connections, policy violations, and external access attempts.

Example service dependency graph:

The image is a diagram from the Hubble UI showing a network of interconnected services, including "recruiter," "jobposting," "crawler," "coreapi," "loader," "elasticsearch," "kafka," and "zookeeper." Each service is represented with its respective ports and protocols.

Avoid exposing the Hubble UI publicly without proper authentication. Use port-forwarding or an ingress with strong access controls.

Launching Hubble UI Locally

Forward the UI port to your workstation:

cilium hubble ui
# Forwarding from 0.0.0.0:12000 -> 8081
# Forwarding from [::]:12000 -> 8081

Then browse to http://localhost:12000.

Hubble CLI

The Hubble CLI offers the same visibility in a terminal-friendly format, ideal for automation and scripts. Check the status inside a Cilium agent pod:

kubectl exec -it -n kube-system cilium-xxxxxx -c cilium-agent -- hubble status
# Healthcheck (via unix:///var/run/cilium/hubble.sock): Ok
# Current/Max Flows: 4,095/4,095 (100.00%)
# Flows/s: 4.72

Installing the Hubble CLI on Linux

HUBBLE_VERSION=$(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cilium/hubble/master/stable.txt)
HUBBLE_ARCH=amd64
if [ "$(uname -m)" = "aarch64" ]; then
  HUBBLE_ARCH=arm64
fi

curl -L --fail --remote-name-all \
  https://github.com/cilium/hubble/releases/download/$HUBBLE_VERSION/hubble-linux-${HUBBLE_ARCH}.tar.gz \
  https://github.com/cilium/hubble/releases/download/$HUBBLE_VERSION/hubble-linux-${HUBBLE_ARCH}.tar.gz.sha256sum

sudo tar xvzf hubble-linux-${HUBBLE_ARCH}.tar.gz -C /usr/local/bin
rm hubble-linux-${HUBBLE_ARCH}.tar.gz.sha256sum

Next, we’ll dive into a hands-on demo to see Hubble in action.

Kubernetes Networking

Container Network Interface(CNI)

Kubernetes Services

Kubernetes Ingress

Network Security

Cilium Hubble Overview

Built-in Metrics for Prometheus

Enabling Hubble Metrics via Helm

Hubble UI and CLI

Hubble UI

Launching Hubble UI Locally

Hubble CLI

Installing the Hubble CLI on Linux

Links and References

Watch Video

​Built-in Metrics for Prometheus

​Enabling Hubble Metrics via Helm

​Hubble UI and CLI

​Hubble UI

​Launching Hubble UI Locally

​Hubble CLI

​Installing the Hubble CLI on Linux

​Links and References

Watch Video

Built-in Metrics for Prometheus

Enabling Hubble Metrics via Helm

Hubble UI and CLI

Hubble UI

Launching Hubble UI Locally

Hubble CLI

Installing the Hubble CLI on Linux

Links and References