Last year at BUILD we announced the public preview of the Network Observability add-on. Today we’re excited to share a massive upgrade to the network observability capabilities available to AKS customers. 

What’s new?

We are excited to announce Advanced Container Networking Services (ACNS), a suite of services built to significantly enhance the operational capabilities of your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters. Advanced Network Observability is the inaugural feature of the ACNS suite bringing the power of Hubble’s control plane to both Cilium and Non-Cilium Linux data planes. With Advanced Network Observability, customers can now pinpoint network-related issues with more precision and detect root causes faster.  The offering provides pod level packet statistics, DNS statistics, L4 connections and enhanced debugging capabilities with network flow logs and DNS error tracking.

Data flow for Advanced Network Observability

How can Azure customers use the new offering?

ACNS is integrated deeply with existing Azure Monitor capabilities for monitoring AKS clusters. Using the new capabilities requires no extra configuration from customers. Customers can enable advanced network observability with a single command. The metrics are then ingested automatically by Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus. Additionally, customers can visualize the metrics in pre-built dashboards in Azure Managed Grafana. Customers have access to 6 pre-built dashboards in Azure Managed Grafana covering a breadth of signals from cluster traffic to DNS and pod level flows.

Pod flows dashboard built into Azure Manged Grafana

How to get ACNS

To get started with ACNS capabilities, please see our onboarding documentation

Read more about ACNS:

Documentation: What is Advanced Container Networking Services?
Azure Blog:  Announcing Advanced Container Networking Services for your Azure Kubernetes Service clusters

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