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Show HN: Alaz: Open-Source, Self-Hosted, eBPF-Based K8s Monitoring

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Show HN: Alaz: Open-Source, Self-Hosted, eBPF-Based K8s Monitoring

#1

Post by fatihbaltaci »

Hello Everyone,

I'm excited to introduce a new open-source observability platform and would love to hear your feedback.

We are aware that there are lots of open-source/commercial tools out there. However, we believe that monitoring the clusters and extracting actionable insights requires deep know-how about the tools/domain. We mainly focused on this problem.

- Alaz is an eBPF agent installed on your K8s cluster as DaemonSet. Thanks to eBPF, Alaz collects traces directly from Linux kernels. This means there's no need for sidecars, instrumentations, or service restarts.

- The UI not only visualizes data but also provides actionable insights. Using the Service Map, you can:

  - View latencies and RPS between services.
  - Detect zombie services and underperforming SQL queries.
  - Monitor golden signals, such as 5xx status codes.
In addition, Alaz can capture system resources like CPU, Memory, Disk, and Network through the Prometheus Node Exporter, which is embedded in the agent.

Setting up is straightforward: just install Alaz as a DaemonSet, and the platform will handle the rest.

Finally, the combination of Alaz and Ddosify Performance Testing makes it possible to do load testing and simultaneously monitor the system to find bottlenecks instantly.

For those interested, check out Alaz on GitHub: https://github.com/ddosify/alaz

Your feedback would be greatly appreciated!

Show HN: Alaz: Open-Source, Self-Hosted, eBPF-Based K8s Monitoring
github.com

Re: Show HN: Alaz: Open-Source, Self-Hosted, eBPF-Based K8s Monitoring

#4

Post by efatnar »

I will be honest with y'all, whenever someone coming with add-on sw launched into kernel I get anxiety attack as a platform engineer. This is very fragile matters both for performance as well as security. I see ddosify-alaz leverages prometheus node exporter for metrics collection which is awesome, using ebpf for service mash-map is promising but as I said I would prefer this part to be configurable to be not deployed if sre/platform teams do not want ebpf but only metric exporter capabilities to feed in to DDosify observability platform. Overall: Great Open source sw launch, please make it flexible for configuration. Cheers!

Re: Show HN: Alaz: Open-Source, Self-Hosted, eBPF-Based K8s Monitoring

#5

Post by bisilar »

First and foremost, congratulations on launching such an innovative project! Your unique approach seems to significantly simplify the process of observing and gaining insights into Kubernetes clusters.

The fact that Alaz can collect traces directly from Linux kernels without the need for sidecars, instrumentation, or service restarts is truly impressive. Additionally, having a UI that not only visualizes data but also provides actionable insights is a great advantage.

I'm eager to follow your product closely and can't wait to try it out when the opportunity arises. I've starred the project on GitHub and am excited about its progress. Best wishes for your continued success!

Re: Show HN: Alaz: Open-Source, Self-Hosted, eBPF-Based K8s Monitoring

#6

Post by fatihbaltaci »

efatnar wrote: post #4

I will be honest with y'all, whenever someone coming with add-on sw launched into kernel I get anxiety attack as a platform engineer. This is very fragile matters both for performance as well as security. I see ddosify-alaz leverages prometheus node exporter for metrics collection which is awesome, using ebpf for service mash-map is promising but as I said I would prefer this part to be configurable to be not deploye…

Thank you for providing us with your valuable feedback. At the moment, the metrics and eBPF sections are configurable but not yet documented. However, we are working on adding this information to our documentation as soon as possible. If you wish to disable the eBPF component and use only metrics instead, you can add the environment variable 'EBPF_ENABLED=false' to your alaz.yaml file.

Alaz utilizes minimal resources for both network and resource collection. CPU and Memory resources are limited in the K8s configuration file.

Alaz is still in its early stages of development and it's being improved based on developer feedback. Thanks again for providing us with your valuable input.

Re: Show HN: Alaz: Open-Source, Self-Hosted, eBPF-Based K8s Monitoring

#7

Post by fatihbaltaci »

bisilar wrote: post #5

First and foremost, congratulations on launching such an innovative project! Your unique approach seems to significantly simplify the process of observing and gaining insights into Kubernetes clusters. The fact that Alaz can collect traces directly from Linux kernels without the need for sidecars, instrumentation, or service restarts is truly impressive. Additionally, having a UI that not only visualizes data but als…

Thank you for your kind words. We greatly appreciate your support, and we're excited for you to try out Alaz. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please don't hesitate to share them with us. Your input will help us improve our product. For support or to share your feedback, please join our community Discord channel at https://discord.com/invite/9KdnrSUZQg.

Re: Show HN: Alaz: Open-Source, Self-Hosted, eBPF-Based K8s Monitoring

#9

Post by mdaniel »

foolswisdom wrote: post #8
mdaniel wrote: post #3

AGPLv3 if that interests you: https://github.com/ddosify/alaz/blob/v0.1.3/LICENSE

Does the AGPL prevent anyone from running this on their own server for themselves (or not, since the source is provided by ddosify)?

No, it's a true FOSS license and not one of the scammy ones in the news of late, but some organizations straight up ban AGPL[1] because it is network viral in a way that hasn't been tested in the courts, so best to just avoid the hassle

I didn't mean my comment in a disparaging way, just trying to answer a FAQ on any such "Show HN" that uses the term "open source" but doesn't otherwise specify. Often that means it's a scam license, and I find that to be doubly true when the submitter craftily omits any mention of the license, but it is not the case here and I applaud the use of an actual FOSS license, even if that means I personally don't get to enjoy using this software

1: e.g. https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl... (discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31176071 and likely a ton of others, too)

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