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Observability vs. Visibility

Observability is the process of gathering, aggregating, normalizing, and presenting data from across your IT monitoring tools to create comprehensive visibility across systems — including data from APM tools, logs, traces, EDR, SIEMs, and more — to make sense of it. Observability gives you the power to see across domains, functions, and systems. Visibility is the outcome you get when observability is done well. It’s the ability to take a deeper look into your stack and understand what’s happening in a meaningful way, whether you’re in infrastructure, security, application development, or operations. In this way, observability is a new way of collaborating across silos and creates a common source of truth for all IT stakeholders.

The Cost of Operating Without Observability

Without comprehensive observability, teams will continue to invest valuable time in reacting to problems inside their silos, dashboards, and their interpretation of root causes. Operating without observability is a missed opportunity. You can’t see the signals that tell you a problem is coming. You can’t automate a response. You can’t innovate. You’re stuck spending resources just to keep the lights on. In today’s business environment, keeping the lights on isn’t enough because the competition is making progress where you aren’t. From a security perspective, the risk is even greater. If you're relying solely on signature-based detection, you may be blind to real threats and miss the ability to identify anomalous behavior across multiple vectors.

The Power of a Unified Approach

Observability enables teams to identify potential risks to the business, including things like system stability or data loss. It provides factual insights to help IT leaders make more informed, data-driven decisions, helps IT teams pivot from reactive to proactive, and ensures that IT delivers its intended value. It allows you to correlate symptoms with root causes, taking the guesswork out of troubleshooting. Observability starts with the data you’re already generating then centralizing and normalizing it for analysis, which leads to a unified view of your environment. With enough data, you can get better context for what’s happening and gain the ability to spot leading indicators of risk. This gives you time to act before an issue begins to impact the business. The ability to personalize insights for each stakeholder is what makes observability valuable for the entire organization. The ability to draw from a single source of truth about IT operations means you can deliver consistent insights for each role. That’s important because observability data needs to be presented in a way that’s easily consumable by key IT stakeholders, each of whom needs specific insights about specific things. For example:

Executives who need visibility into risk, ROI, and alignment with business goals
Infrastructure teams who focus on system health, availability, and scalability
Application development leaders who want performance data, user insights, and fast feedback loops
IT operations teams who care about day-to-day reliability and responsiveness
Security teams that rely on cross-domain visibility for threat detection and incident response

This unified, role-aware approach enables:

Faster root cause analysis
Automated remediation of common issues
Smarter change management
Better alignment with business objectives

Observability should be treated as a strategic initiative, not a one-off project. Like zero trust, it requires long-term commitment and executive sponsorship, which is why the stakeholders also need to be involved with crafting an observability strategy. The broader the input, the broader the adoption and the greater the payoff.

Tangible Business Benefits

Observability helps the business understand how IT is driving business value. It links IT health directly to outcomes like revenue protection, risk reduction, and strategic agility. Quantitative benefits of observability can include:

Reduced MTTR: Teams resolve issues faster because they can pinpoint the real cause
Increased uptime: Systems are more stable, available, and predictable
Optimized costs: Better data leads to better infrastructure sizing, fewer manual tasks, and more automation
Shorter change windows: You have the confidence to move faster and by leveraging asset relationship views, make informed decisions that reduce application downtimes

Qualitative advantages can include:

Better work life for IT teams: Teams spend less time troubleshooting and more time innovating
Improved customer satisfaction: Fewer disruptions and faster fixes make happy users
Stronger security posture: More complete insight leads to faster, smarter threat detection and response
Reduced risk profile: By tying business processes back to the IT processes that support them, you better understand vulnerabilities, availability, and reliability.

Measuring Success with Observability

Success with observability results in your IT organization spending less time reacting and more time delivering value. One of the simplest ways to measure success is to look at two metrics:

Increased uptime and availability
Decreased MTTR

These are the blocking-and-tackling benefits every observability initiative should deliver. As your observability practice matures, you can accumulate other measurable benefits, such as:

Reduced incident volume over time
Shorter change windows
Better customer experience scores
Faster security response times

How Evolving Solutions and Keyva Can Help

Whether you're just beginning your observability journey or trying to scale a mature practice, Evolving Solutions and Keyva can help clients create an effective observability approach that can drive tangible business outcomes. We focus on delivering real business outcomes, not just dashboards. We meet clients where they are to help them define a strategy, select the right tools, or more fully utilize tools they already have to maximize their existing investments. We also have the talent to help you choose the right technology for your organization, structure a roadmap, and co-create a solution. With a broad view across clients and industries, we see what works and what doesn’t, which helps you avoid common pitfalls. Contact us today to get started. [table id=14 /] [post_title] => Beyond Monitoring: The Case for Unified IT Observability [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => beyond-monitoring-the-case-for-unified-it-observability [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-06-04 13:37:35 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-06-04 13:37:35 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://keyvatech.com/?p=5099 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [2] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 5076 [post_author] => 7 [post_date] => 2025-05-21 16:53:27 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-05-21 16:53:27 [post_content] => Read about a client who faced a significant challenge in securing their AWS environment, which exposed the organization to potential service disruptions, security breaches, data exposure, and regulatory non-compliance. Download now. [post_title] => Case Study: AWS Security for Business Resilience [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => case-study-aws-security-for-business-resilience [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-05-21 16:53:27 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-05-21 16:53:27 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://keyvatech.com/?p=5076 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [3] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 4985 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-05-14 16:22:39 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-05-14 16:22:39 [post_content] => Kubernetes powers modern cloud-native infrastructure, but its networking layer often demands more than basic tools can deliver—enter Cilium, an eBPF-powered Container Network Interface (CNI). This blog explores Cilium’s features, a practical use case with a diagram, step-by-step installation and configuration, and a comparison with Istio. Whether you’re securing workloads or optimizing performance, Cilium’s got something to offer—let’s dive in!

What is Cilium CNI?

Cilium is an open-source CNI plugin that leverages eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) to enhance Kubernetes networking. Running custom programs in the Linux kernel, Cilium outpaces traditional CNIs like Flannel or Calico by offering advanced security, observability, and Layer 3-7 control—all without modifying your apps.

Cilium Capability Services Diagram:

[caption id="attachment_4987" align="alignleft" width="436"]

Source: https://github.com/cilium/cilium/blob/main/Documentation/images/cilium-overview.png[/caption]

Key Features of Cilium

eBPF Performance: Kernel-level packet handling for speed and efficiency.
Identity-Based Security: Policies tied to Kubernetes labels, not fleeting IPs.
Layer 7 Enforcement: Controls application traffic (e.g., HTTP, gRPC).
Transparent Encryption: Secures communication with IPsec or WireGuard.
Hubble Observability: Real-time network insights.

Cilium’s strengths make it a standout for microservices-heavy clusters.

What is Hubble?

Hubble is a fully distributed networking and security observability platform for cloud native workloads. It is built on top of Cilium and eBPF to enable deep visibility into the communication and behavior of services as well as the networking infrastructure in a completely transparent manner. Hubble helps teams understand service dependencies and communication maps, operational monitoring and alerting, application monitoring, and security observability. [caption id="attachment_4990" align="alignnone" width="417"]

Source: https://github.com/cilium/hubble/blob/main/Documentation/images/hubble_arch.png[/caption]

Why Cilium?

Traditional CNIs hit limits with scale—iptables slow down, and IP-based rules struggle with dynamic pods. Cilium’s eBPF approach and Layer 7 support, paired with Hubble’s visibility, address these gaps. But how does it compare to Istio? We’ll get there—first, a use case.

Use Case: Securing an E-Commerce Microservices App

Imagine managing a Kubernetes cluster for an e-commerce platform with user management, order processing, and payment services implemented using 3 tier web architecture:

Frontend: NGINX web server for customer requests.
Backend: Node.js API for user management, order processing & payment services.
Database: PostgreSQL for persisting sensitive data.

Requirements

Secure communication between microservices, ensuring that only authorized services can communicate with each other
Granular control over HTTP traffic, allowing specific endpoints to be exposed or blocked

Restrict frontend-to-backend traffic to port 8080.
Limit backend-to-database traffic to port 5432.
Block external database access.
Real-time visibility into network traffic for troubleshooting and security monitoring.

Cilium handles this with ease.

Use Case Diagram

Arrows (----->): Allowed traffic paths with ports.
Labels: Used for Cilium’s identity-based policies.
Blocked: External access denied by default.

Installing Cilium

Let’s install Cilium on your Kubernetes cluster. This section walks through prerequisites, setup, and validation for a smooth deployment.

Prerequisites

Kubernetes Cluster: Running 1.30+ (e.g., Minikube, Kind, or a cloud provider like EKS/GKE).
Helm: Version 3.x installed (helm version to check).
kubectl: Configured to access your cluster.
Linux Kernel: 4.9+ with eBPF support (most modern distros qualify—check with uname -r).

Step 1: Prepare Your Cluster

Ensure your cluster is ready:

kubectl get nodes

Step 2: Add Cilium Helm Repository Add and update the Helm repo:

helm repo add cilium https://helm.cilium.io/
helm repo update

Step 3: Install Cilium with Hubble Deploy Cilium with observability enabled:

helm install cilium cilium/cilium --version 1.14.0 \
  --namespace kube-system \
  --set kubeProxyReplacement=disabled \
  --set hubble.enabled=true \
  --set hubble.relay.enabled=true \
  --set hubble.ui.enabled=true

--set kubeProxyReplacement=disabled: Keeps kube-proxy (set to true for full replacement if desired).
--set hubble.*: Enables Hubble and its UI for monitoring.

Step 4: Validate Installation Check pod status:

kubectl get pods -n kube-system -l k8s-app=cilium

Expect output like:

NAME            READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
cilium-abc123   1/1     Running   0          5m
cilium-xyz789   1/1     Running   0          5m

Also verify Hubble:

kubectl get pods -n kube-system -l k8s-app=hubble-relay

Step 5: Test Connectivity Deploy a simple pod and test networking:

kubectl run test-pod --image=nginx --restart=Never
kubectl exec -it test-pod -- curl <another-pod-ip>

Cilium should route traffic seamlessly.

Configuring Cilium for the Use Case

Now, configure Cilium for our e-commerce app.

Step 1: Label Pods

Add labels to your deployments:

# Frontend (snippet)
metadata:
  labels:
    app: frontend
# Backend
metadata:
  labels:
    app: backend
# Database
metadata:
  labels:
    app: database

Apply: kubectl apply -f <file>.yaml.

Step 2: Apply Network Policies

Define CiliumNetworkPolicy resources:

Policy 1: Frontend-to-Backend

apiVersion: cilium.io/v2
kind: CiliumNetworkPolicy
metadata:
  name: frontend-to-backend
spec:
  endpointSelector:
    matchLabels:
      app: backend
  ingress:
  - fromEndpoints:
    - matchLabels:
        app: frontend
    toPorts:
    - ports:
      - port: "8080"
        protocol: TCP

Policy 2: Backend-to-Database

apiVersion: cilium.io/v2
kind: CiliumNetworkPolicy
metadata:
  name: backend-to-db
spec:
  endpointSelector:
    matchLabels:
      app: database
  ingress:
  - fromEndpoints:
    - matchLabels:
        app: backend
    toPorts:
    - ports:
      - port: "5432"
        protocol: TCP

Apply: kubectl apply -f <file>.yaml. Step 3: Enable Hubble Start Hubble:

cilium hubble port-forward &

Monitor:

hubble observe --selector app=backend

Output:

Feb 22 2025 14:00:01 frontend-xyz -> backend-abc ALLOWED (TCP 8080)
Feb 22 2025 14:00:02 backend-abc -> database-def ALLOWED (TCP 5432)

Feb 22 2025 14:00:03 external-ip -> database-def DROPPED

Step 4: Optional Layer 7 Policy

Restrict to GET requests:
apiVersion: cilium.io/v2
kind: CiliumNetworkPolicy
metadata:
  name: frontend-to-backend-l7
spec:
  endpointSelector:
    matchLabels:
      app: backend
  ingress:
  - fromEndpoints:
    - matchLabels:
        app: frontend
    toPorts:
    - ports:
      - port: "8080"
        protocol: TCP
      rules:
        http:
        - method: "GET"
          path: "/api/.*"

Apply: kubectl apply -f frontend-to-backend-l7.yaml.

Istio vs. Cilium: A Comparison

Cilium and Istio both enhance Kubernetes networking, but they differ in scope and approach.

Overview

Cilium: CNI for Layer 3-7 networking and security via eBPF.
Istio: Service mesh for application-layer traffic management via sidecar proxies (Envoy).

Key Differences

Aspect	Cilium	Istio
Layer	Kernel (eBPF, L3-L7)	Application (sidecar, L7 focus)
Primary Role	Networking + security	Traffic management + observability
Performance	High (no proxies)	Sidecar overhead
Security	Identity policies, encryption	mTLS, L7 rules
Observability	Hubble (flow logs)	Metrics, traces (Prometheus, grafana)
Use Case Fit	Cluster-wide networking	Microservices communication

Strengths

Cilium: Lightweight, broad networking scope, deep packet visibility.
Istio: Advanced L7 features (e.g., retries, canaries), multi-cluster support.

When to Choose?

Cilium: Ideal for our use case—securing and monitoring cluster traffic efficiently.
Istio: Better for microservices needing traffic splitting or tracing and complex service-to-service communication patterns.
Both: Use Cilium for networking, Istio for service mesh features.

The Result

Our e-commerce app gains:

Security: Locked-down traffic, external threats blocked.
Visibility: Hubble logs for fast debugging.
Scalability: eBPF performance at scale.

Conclusion

Cilium transforms Kubernetes networking with eBPF, offering a potent mix of security, speed, and insight. Its installation is straightforward, and it shines in use cases like ours—while holding its own against Istio. Try it out and reach Keyva for any professional services support! [table id=13 /] [post_title] => Cilium CNI & Hubble: A Deep Dive with Installation, Configuration, Use Case Scenario and Istio Comparison [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => cilium-cni-hubble-a-deep-dive-with-installation-configuration-use-case-scenario-and-istio-comparison [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-05-21 16:55:42 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-05-21 16:55:42 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://keyvatech.com/?p=4985 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [4] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 5039 [post_author] => 7 [post_date] => 2025-05-05 19:50:28 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-05-05 19:50:28 [post_content] =>

Manage Your Entire IT Infrastructure with One Service Model.

Download now. [post_title] => Create Seamless Integrations to Support Single Pane-of-glass Visibility [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => create-seamless-integrations-to-support-single-pane-of-glass-visibility [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-05-05 19:50:28 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-05-05 19:50:28 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://keyvatech.com/?p=5039 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [5] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 4981 [post_author] => 7 [post_date] => 2025-04-29 15:07:41 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-04-29 15:07:41 [post_content] => Many things are usually easy when you first start out. For example, purchasing a new home is exciting and straightforward at first, but over time, maintenance issues arise, insurance costs and property taxes increase, and neighborhood dynamics change. Suddenly that dream home starts keeping you up at night. It is the same with the cloud.

Beyond the Cloud’s Silver Lining

Cloud adoption is easy at the beginning too. Cloud providers typically offer straightforward onboarding processes for small-scale migrations using an easy-to-use GUI interface. The pay-as-you-go model seems like a great deal compared to the cost of depreciating datacenter assets, forklift upgrades and software maintenance. Cloud offers a perfect alternative to fixed depreciating assets, especially when organizations have a need for increased workloads based on seasonal business trends. However, the more services and applications you migrate to the cloud, it becomes increasingly important to manage these assets in a standardized and streamlined manner.

Cloud costs can become increasingly difficult to manage as more services across multiple clouds are expanded, given that each cloud provider has a different pricing model, as well as costs can escalate rapidly due to factors like data transfer, storage, and unexpected usage spikes.
With increased cloud adoption, there is a tendency to overlook wasted resources. Once resources are provisioned manually, their continuous existence accrues on the monthly bill; so increased discipline is needed to keep the resource utilization to only what is needed.
Underutilization of resources is one of the biggest challenges in the Cloud. There is a tendency to overprovision the sizing of resources because they are available, and this causes wasteful spending for organizations.

In the beginning, cloud optimization may seem like a Day 2 exercise; however, it can quickly become an imperative activity if budgets are exceeded due to unintentional wastage of resources. The cloud is no different than on prem in the fact that it requires planning, continuous monitoring, and proactive management to ensure that everything runs to meet business objectives. It is something you cannot afford to put off.

Why aren’t Companies Achieving Cost Optimization?

If the cloud was supposed to be simpler than on-prem, then why does cloud optimization seem elusive to some organizations? A primary reason is the pace at which cloud transformation has taken place; the priority has often been “move to the cloud first and worry about optimization later”. It is an easy trap to get into. At Keyva, we've seen companies spend substantial amounts on cloud migrations, sometimes up to a million dollars per month. Imagine if you could save just 2% of that expenditure. That translates into real savings that could be reinvested in other business initiatives. Another reason why optimization isn’t achieved for a while is that like anything, the cloud has a learning curve, and some of those lessons can prove quite costly. Consulting with third-party experts who understand common pitfalls and mistakes can help you bypass the trial-and-error phase. These experts can guide you through the optimization process, ensuring you avoid the typical gotchas and costly errors and achieve cost efficiency and ROI sooner.

Achieving Operational Hygiene

We often hear about security hygiene. At Keyva, we also emphasize operational hygiene. That topic includes a lot of things, and one of the big ones is right-sizing. Overprovisioning is the #1 culprit of cloud overspending and it’s surprisingly easy to do. When choosing options in the cloud menu, the largest ones may be chosen for you by default, or you may be driven by normal human tendency to select a larger option. An organization should have guardrails to ensure a structured process for choosing the right amount and right-sized resource bundles. This can be done in several ways – by establishing a committee that must approve larger or expensive options to prevent unnecessary expenditures, or by using infrastructure as code methodologies. By incorporating chargeback and showback features which enhance cost visibility and accountability, it can be helpful to see the breakdown for features and resources used by various teams within the organization. Here’s how they work:

Showback provides detailed reports on cloud resource usage and associated costs without directly billing departments. It can serve as an educational tool to enhance cost awareness and help teams understand their cloud spending patterns and identify areas for cost optimization.
Chargeback involves directly billing departments or teams for their cloud resource usage to make them transparent. Tying costs to actual usage prevents wasteful spending and aligns cloud costs with departmental budgets. This approach promotes financial accountability and encourages teams to optimize their resource allocation.

Some Steps are Easy

Cloud optimization doesn't have to be complicated. It can be as simple as turning off resources after use. Just as you learned to turn off lights when leaving a room to save on the electric bill, you should deprovision resources when they're not needed. The sooner guardrails are set up to manage cloud costs, the better it is for adoption. While provisioning cloud native VMs or services in response to demand spikes is typically prioritized, turning them off after intended use or reducing the size and scale of utilized clusters should receive equal attention. All of this can be automated using infrastructure as code pipelines as well. License bundling is another simple but effective strategy for optimizing cloud costs as it helps streamline expenses, enhances flexibility and reduces administrative overhead. Much like cloud computing, where shared resources maximize efficiency, bundled licensing prevents service redundancies and minimizes underutilized cloud instances. By consolidating licenses, organizations ensure they are only paying for what they actually need, leading to greater cost efficiency and a more optimized cloud environment.

The 15-point Approach