Using Weave Scope with Calico Networking
Today we are very pleased to welcome the following guest post by Mat Meredith, a Core Developer on Project Calico. ICYMI – Weave Scope can provide monitoring and container visibility to any network. Mat shows how this is...
Today we are very pleased to welcome the following guest post by Mat Meredith, a Core Developer on Project Calico. ICYMI – Weave Scope can provide monitoring and container visibility to any network. Mat shows how this is done below. This post also appears on the Calico blog today, and has been cross posted with permission.
— alexis
Calico and Weave Scope
At Project Calico, we’re currently looking at developing some Calico specific visualization and troubleshooting tools. Of course, before we started we wanted to look and see what else is already available…
One tool that looks good for visualizing what’s happening in a Docker deployment is Weave Scope which “generates a map of your containers, enabling you to intuitively understand, monitor, and control your applications.” Scope is intended to work with any Docker deployment — you don’t have to be using Weave Net and so we thought we’d give it a try with a Calico Docker network.
It’s early days — so far we’ve only tried it with a very simple two host sample deployment — but it looks like this “just works” — see the sample screenshots below.
Scope gives you views of your containers and applications and shows connectivity between them based on active TCP connections. You can choose to view individual containers or applications, or you can collapse them down based on image / process name to simplify the diagrams and show the logical relationships (inferred based on active TCP connections).
We’re now looking to see where we can deliver additional value in the area of visualization and troubleshooting with a Calico network operator focus for all types of Calico workloads (containers, VMs, bare metal). For example to visualize and verify configured security policies.
Watch this space, and meanwhile, if you have any favorite tools you are already using in this area, or any specific use-cases you’d like to see met, we’d love to hear from you.
Basic two host Calico network showing individual Calico and Scope processes
Application view (grouped by name)
Application details for Calico’s felix process on core-01
Container view (showing details of the Weave Scope container)
Hosts view (showing details of host core-01)
