GCB and GigaVUE‑FM Interaction

Following are the interactions between GCB and GigaVUE‑FM:

GCB Registration

When GCB comes up in the Kubernetes environment, GCB registers itself with GigaVUE‑FM. When GigaVUE‑FM is unreachable, GCB tries to connect with five retries of increasing time periods. If the GigaVUE‑FM is unreachable even after the retries, Kubernetes deployment of GCB fails. GCB only supports IPv4 protocol.

GCB Deregistration

When GCB is terminated normally, GCB sends the deregistration message to GigaVUE-FM. If GCB goes down abnormally, it might not get deregistered. The GCB Pods associated to a GCB node might then get moved to the other GCB node. Similarly, if a GCB goes down, the feeding G-vTAPs are moved to the other GCB, and the GigaVUE‑FM does not store information of the GCB Pod.

GCB Heartbeats

Periodically, GCB sends heartbeats to GigaVUE-FM. By default, the status of GCB is marked as Connected. The following are the various scenarios where the GCB status changes:

  • If 3 consecutive heartbeats are missed, GigaVUE-FM marks the status as Disconnected.
  • If 2 consecutive heartbeats are missed, GigaVUE-FM marks the status as Pending.
  • If GigaVUE-FM does not receive GCB heartbeats for 30 days, then GigaVUE-FM removes the GCB, considering it as stale.

GCB Statistics

GCB sends traffic statistics and associated GCB Pods to GigaVUE‑FM. The highest traffic and lowest traffic widgets in GigaVUE‑FM dashboard shows the details of 10 highest and 10 lowest GCB traffic statistics.

GCB continues to send the statistics even when there is no traffic flowing. The GCB statistics are not stored in cache even when GigaVUE‑FM is not reachable by GCB at that instant of time.

Monitoring Domain and Traffic Policy

You can configure and manage the Monitoring Domains, Traffic Policies, Connections, Metadata fields, and Source Inventories of GCB in GigaVUE-FM. Refer to the GigaVUE-FM REST API Reference for detailed information on the REST APIs of GCB. 

  • A Traffic Policy is a combination of Rules and Tunnels.
  • A rule contains specific filtering criteria that the packets must match. The filtering criteria lets you determine the target instances and the (egress or ingress) direction of tapping the network traffic.
  • A tunnel is a communication path in which the traffic matching the filtered criteria is routed to the destination.