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Installing the Network Observability CLI

The Network Observability CLI (oc netobserv) is deployed separately from the Network Observability Operator. The CLI is available as an OpenShift CLI (oc) plugin. It provides a lightweight way to quickly debug and troubleshoot with network observability.

About the Network Observability CLI

You can quickly debug and troubleshoot networking issues by using the Network Observability CLI (oc netobserv). The Network Observability CLI is a flow and packet visualization tool that relies on eBPF agents to stream collected data to an ephemeral collector pod. It requires no persistent storage during the capture. After the run, the output is transferred to your local machine. This enables quick, live insight into packets and flow data without installing the Network Observability Operator.

CLI capture is meant to run only for short durations, such as 8-10 minutes. If it runs for too long, it can be difficult to delete the running process.

Installing the Network Observability CLI

Installing the Network Observability CLI (oc netobserv) is a separate procedure from the Network Observability Operator installation. This means that, even if you have the Operator installed from OperatorHub, you need to install the CLI separately.

You can optionally use Krew to install the netobserv CLI plugin. For more information, see "Installing a CLI plugin with Krew".
Prerequisites

  • You must install the OpenShift CLI (oc).

  • You must have a macOS or Linux operating system.

Procedure

  1. Download the oc netobserv CLI tar file that corresponds with your architecture.

  2. Unpack the archive. For example, for the amd64 archive, run the following command:

    $ tar xvf netobserv-cli-linux-amd64.tar.gz

  3. Make the file executable:

    $ chmod +x ./oc-netobserv

  4. Move the extracted netobserv-cli binary to a directory that is on your PATH, such as /usr/local/bin/:

    $ sudo mv ./oc-netobserv /usr/local/bin/
Verification

  • Verify that oc netobserv is available:

    $ oc netobserv version
    Example output
    Netobserv CLI version <version>
Additional resources