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Cilium eBPF Map Pressure and Kernel Conntrack Saturation Sentinel

Monitors Cilium CNI eBPF map pressure to prevent kernel connection table overflow and pod packet dropouts.

Categories
CloudInfrastructure

How it works

This workflow connects to the Cilium CNI Prometheus endpoint (port 9962) to audit the cilium_bpf_map_pressure metric. Cilium relies on Linux kernel eBPF hash tables (maps) to manage connection tracking (conntrack), NAT tables, and network policies. In high-connection microservice environments, when eBPF maps reach capacity (80-100%), the Linux kernel rejects new flow allocations, resulting in silent packet drops, connection resets, and intermittent service DNS resolution failures. This workflow detects pressure build-up and dispatches warnings before connection tables overflow.

What you get

  • Real-time detection of eBPF kernel map capacity saturation.
  • Prevents packet loss and intermittent network dropouts across Kubernetes worker nodes.
  • Clear quantitative ratios on conntrack table headroom.

Who it's for

  • Kubernetes Network Engineers and Platform Reliability Leads.
  • SREs managing high-throughput microservices on Cilium CNI.

Why orchestrate this with Kestra

  • Continuous Kernel Telemetry Auditing: Evaluates low-level networking parameters automatically.
  • Multi-Node Visibility: Can be run against cluster-wide Prometheus endpoints or specific nodes.
  • Instant Team Alerting: Delivers actionable notifications directly to networking on-call channels.

Prerequisites

  • Cilium CNI installed with Prometheus metrics enabled (prometheus.enabled=true).
  • Secret SLACK_WEBHOOK configured in Kestra.

Quick start

  1. Import the blueprint.
  2. Configure the Cilium metrics endpoint and threshold.
  3. Run the workflow to inspect eBPF map pressure.

How to extend

  • Inspect specific map names using the map_name label on cilium_bpf_map_pressure.
  • Automatically scale up bpf.ctMapMax parameters via CiliumConfig CRD when saturation occurs.

Links

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