If you haven’t updated your Sematext Agent in a while, the new Network Map might be a very good incentive to do so now. Sematext Agent 4.4.x uses eBPF to collect information about network traffic between various types of entities in your network – services, hosts, pods, containers, and processes – as well as connections with external networks. The agent collects important metrics about each detected entity and each network connection. Ultimately, this is presented as a Network Map in Sematext Cloud UI.

If your services, applications, and infra are already instrumented with OpenTelemetry then you may have another type of map – Service Dependency Map – in Sematext. But the two maps are quite different:

• Network Map does not require any instrumentation. You just install Sematext Agent and enable Network Map in Sematext Cloud.
• Network Map is priced per host and starts at only $1.68/host. We don’t care how many transactions or spans or network connections your applications and services generate.

Network Map packs a lot of functionality! It’s a great way to quickly see the hotspots, dependencies between internal and on external services, performance bottlenecks, unhealthy entities, network connections, and more. Details are available in the Network Map documentation. Here are the highlights.

Nodes on the map represent services, bare metal hosts or virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, pods, or containers, depending on the view mode.

Clicking on any node will give you details about it in the side panel. Details for nodes vary depending on the node type.

Edges between nodes represent network connections and are clickable as well. They also carry labels for easy access to connection metrics like throughput, latency, etc.

There are multiple layouts you can use: Organic and Hierarchical.

While looking at the map as a whole is interesting, and the map interface is good to visually spot hotspots and see dependencies, in the top-right you will see callouts to the most critical nodes and connections. The thresholds that determine criticality are configurable.

 

You can filter the map using a number of filters. Quick filters are based on thresholds you can configure, but there are also a number of other attributes you can filter by.

 

Nodes and edges are coloured based on metrics of your choice and the values of those metrics.

 

You can specify the thresholds for colouring for each of these criteria.

Quick Guide is a good place to look for reminders about what is what on the map.

When you are in the Infrastructure view mode and looking at a Kubernetes cluster you can see the number of nodes, pods, and containers in that cluster. Clicking on the blue area at the bottom edge of each of those entities will let you drill deeper into that hierarchy, all the way down to an individual process: cluster > nodes > pods > containers > process

Clicking on the blue area with “5 nodes, 141 pods, 146 containers” would take you from the Kubernetes cluster view to Kubernetes nodes view. The image below shows a zoomed-in view to one of the nodes.

Clicking on the blue area on the node above lets you drill down to the Pods view.

From Pods you can get to Containers.

And from Containers you get to the Processes screen.

On all views, whether service map view or infrastructure map, regardless of the level of the hierarchy you are looking at, clicking on the node on the map will give you detailed information about that node, various resource utilization metrics, number of restarts, kills, etc. and, of course, the incoming and outgoing network connections and their details.

If some of your Sematext Agents are too old, you will see a notice about it in top-left.

When we discover services or hosts that appear unmonitored we will show them to you. If these services or hosts belong to you, installing the Sematext Agent on them will increase your infrastructure and application’s monitored surface.

 

You can move around the map with click and drag. Unlocking the map allows you to move individual nodes around. You can zoom in/out using your track pad or scroll button or by clicking on +/- in the bottom-left corner.

If your map is very large you can click on and drag the gray part of the minimap in the bottom-right corner to focus on a specific area of the map.

You might have multiple Infra Apps for your different environments – Test, Production East, Production West, Production Europe, etc. The Apps dropdown allows you to limit the map to only specific Apps. By default, all are included.

See Network Map documentation for more.

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