Troubleshooting Network Topology

Network Topology in SolarWinds Observability SaaS provides visibility into how workloads communicate within your Kubernetes cluster. The data source depends on your SWO K8s Collector version:

SWO K8s Collector version	Network monitoring technology	Status
5.0 and later	OBI (OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation)	Current — enabled by default
4.x and earlier	eBPF Network Monitoring (SolarWinds proprietary)	Deprecated

If you also have Istio deployed in your cluster, the collector can use Istio traffic telemetry as an additional source for Network Topology, regardless of which other monitoring technology is in use.

The OBI monitoring technology used by this feature has specific requirements for the client node operating system. For details, see OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation Requirements.

OBI is enabled by default in SWO K8s Collector 5.0 and later. You can manage it with the network_topology.enabled Helm value:

# Enable OBI (default)
network_topology:
  enabled: true