Calico is a popular CNI plugin for Kubernetes. It leverages Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) for communicating routes available on nodes. This method fosters a highly scalable networking model between our workloads.

Since load balancers are active devices that can be included in the design of a WAN, the question arises: Should we adapt our monitoring scheme to include something that could be called Load Balancer Monitoring? To answer this question we can assume that WAN monitoring is based on the following fact: the behaviour of communication links directly affects the performance of applications and therefore the entire platform.

To fully understand what NetFlow is and why it’s used for network monitoring, we first need to know what a flow is. When computers need to talk to one another they establish communication channels, commonly referred to as connections. (Technically speaking, these communication channels can only be called connections when the TCP protocol is involved.) A flow refers to any connection or connection-like communication channel.