Using the Debug Sidecar

Debugging a service mesh can be hard. When something just isn’t working, isthe problem with the proxy? With the application? With the client? With theunderlying network? Sometimes, nothing beats looking at raw network data.

In cases where you need network-level visibility into packets entering andleaving your application, Linkerd provides a debug sidecar with some helpfultooling. Similar to how proxy sidecarinjection works, you add a debug sidecar toa pod by setting the config.linkerd.io/enable-debug-sidecar: true annotationat pod creation time. For convenience, the linkerd inject command provides an—enable-debug-sidecar option that does this annotation for you.

(Note that the set of containers in a Kubernetes pod is not mutable, so simplyadding this annotation to a pre-existing pod will not work. It must be presentat pod creation time.)

The debug sidecar image containstshark, tcpdump,lsof, and iproute2. Once installed, it starts automatically logging allincoming and outgoing traffic with tshark, which can then be viewed withkubectl logs. Alternatively, you can use kubectl exec to access thecontainer and run commands directly.

For instance, if you’ve gone through the Linkerd GettingStarted guide and installed theemojivoto application, and wish to debug traffic to the voting service, youcould run:

kubectl -n emojivoto get deploy/voting -o yaml \
  | linkerd inject --enable-debug-sidecar - \
  | kubectl apply -f -

to deploy the debug sidecar container to all pods in the voting service.(Note that there’s only one pod in this deployment, which will be recreatedto do this–see the note about pod mutability above.)

You can confirm that the debug container is running by listingall the containers in pods with the voting-svc label:

kubectl get pods -n emojivoto -l app=voting-svc \
  -o jsonpath='{.items[*].spec.containers[*].name}'

Then, you can watch live tshark output from the logs by simply running:

kubectl -n emojivoto logs deploy/voting linkerd-debug -f

If that’s not enough, you can exec to the container and run your own commandsin the context of the network. For example, if you want to inspect the HTTP headersof the requests, you could run something like this:

kubectl -n emojivoto exec -it \
  $(kubectl -n emojivoto get pod -l app=voting-svc \
    -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}') \
  -c linkerd-debug -- tshark -i any -f "tcp" -V -Y "http.request"

Of course, this only works if you have the ability to exec into arbitrarycontainers in the Kubernetes cluster. See linkerdtap for an alternative to this approach.