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Overview

Network Map gives you a real-time, visual representation of your entire infrastructure topology. Using eBPF-powered network insights collected by the Sematext Agent, you can see how your services, pods, containers, and processes communicate across Kubernetes clusters and standalone hosts.

Instead of mentally piecing together your infrastructure from logs, metrics, and configuration files, Network Map shows you the actual connections happening right now. When something breaks, you can immediately see which services are affected and trace the problem to its source.

Network Map Services View

Why Use Network Map?

Traditional monitoring tells you that a service is slow or throwing errors. Network Map shows you why and exactly where - maybe a downstream database is overloaded, or traffic is being routed through an unexpected path, or a new service deployment broke a critical connection.

With Network Map, you can:

Understand your infrastructure at a glance. See all your services, how they connect, and what protocols they use. No more guessing which services talk to which databases, or wondering if that new microservice is actually being called.

Troubleshoot faster. When an alert fires, open Network Map to immediately see the affected service and all its dependencies. Click on connections to see traffic volume, latency, and protocol details. Identify bottlenecks by spotting services with high CPU or memory usage - they're colored red so you can't miss them.

Navigate complex Kubernetes environments. Drill down from cluster to node to pod to container to process. See inter-node traffic, identify which pods are communicating across nodes, and understand your namespace topology.

Discover your services automatically. Network Map detects over 100 service types including databases, caches, message queues, and web servers. You don't need to configure anything - it recognizes PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, Nginx, and many more from their network signatures.

Reduce infrastructure costs. Identify over-provisioned services that are consuming resources but are barely being used. Spot redundant connections, find services that could be consolidated, and discover unused infrastructure. When you can see exactly what's running and how it's being used, you can make informed decisions about where to cut costs without impacting performance.

Replace outdated architecture diagrams. Static diagrams get stale the moment they're created, and nobody wants to maintain them. Network Map shows your actual architecture as it exists right now - no more onboarding new engineers with outdated documentation or hunting for the "latest" version of a diagram that doesn't exist.

Two Ways to View Your Infrastructure

Network Map offers two complementary views, accessible via tabs at the top of the interface:

The Services View shows your business applications and their connections. This is ideal for understanding service dependencies and troubleshooting application-level issues. You can see at a glance which services connect to your databases, how traffic flows between components, and where bottlenecks occur.

The Infrastructure View shows your physical and virtual infrastructure hierarchy. For Kubernetes, you can drill down from clusters to nodes to pods to containers to processes. For standalone hosts, you see your servers and the services running on them. This view is perfect for capacity planning, identifying noisy neighbors, and understanding resource distribution.

Use Cases

Beyond day-to-day monitoring, Network Map helps with scenarios that are hard to tackle with traditional tools:

Discover unknown dependencies. "I didn't know service X talks to database Y" - these surprises often surface during incidents. Network Map shows all connections, including ones that weren't in the original architecture design or that were added without updating documentation.

Detect suspicious connections. See which external IPs and destinations your services communicate with. Spot unexpected outbound connections that might indicate compromised services or misconfigured applications reaching unintended endpoints.

Identify data exfiltration. Unusual outbound data volumes from databases or internal services can indicate a security breach. Network Map shows traffic volumes on every connection, making abnormal patterns visible.

Find rogue processes. Detect unexpected processes making network calls. Malware, cryptocurrency miners, or unauthorized applications often reveal themselves through their network activity.

Uncover cross-region cost leakage. Cloud providers charge for cross-region and cross-zone traffic. Network Map reveals connections you didn't know existed - like a US service regularly calling an EU database - so you can address unexpected bandwidth costs.

Audit third-party integrations. See exactly which external services your infrastructure communicates with. Useful for security reviews, compliance audits, and understanding your actual attack surface.

Getting Started

To use Network Map, you need:

  1. At least one Infra App created in Sematext Cloud
  2. Sematext Agent installed on your hosts (version 4.1.x or later)

Once enabled, Network Map starts collecting data immediately. Within a few minutes, you'll see your first topology visualization.

See Getting Started for detailed setup instructions.

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