How to Use VPC Flow Logs to Troubleshoot GKE Workload Issues Faster

At a glance

In Kubernetes, pod IP addresses often change, making it hard to find causes using network records alone. This article explains how to add Kubernetes information to Google Cloud's VPC Flow Logs so you can see which workloads are communicating by name.

Key points

1. 1

   Flow logs (records of network connections) store the cluster, workload, namespace, and service names together.

2. 2

   You can still identify which workload was involved after a pod has been deleted.

3. 3

   You can check this at the network layer without installing extra programs.

4. 4

   Flow Analyzer (a analysis tool) lets you view traffic volume by workload in charts and tables.

Why it matters

Looking at communication by service name instead of addresses helps narrow down the cause of outages faster and makes it easier to find unauthorized connections.