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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

The Network Observability CLI gives you a lightweight way to quickly debug and troubleshoot network observability. It must be installed separately.

Installing the Network Observability CLI (oc netobserv) is a separate procedure from the Network Observability Operator installation. This means that, even if the Operator is installed from the software catalog, the CLI must be installed separately.

Users 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.

  • You must install either docker or podman.

You can use podman or docker to run the installation commands. This procedure uses podman.
Procedure

  1. Log in to the Red Hat registry by running the following command:

    $ podman login registry.redhat.io

  2. Extract the oc-netobserv file from the image by running the following commands:

    $ podman create --name netobserv-cli registry.redhat.io/network-observability/network-observability-cli-rhel9:1.10
$ podman cp netobserv-cli:/oc-netobserv .
$ podman rm netobserv-cli

  3. Move the extracted file to a directory that is on the system’s PATH, such as /usr/local/bin/, by running the following command:

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

  1. Verify that oc netobserv is available:

    $ oc netobserv version

    This command should produce an outcome similar to the following example:

Netobserv CLI version <version>
Additional resources