About the Book
Observability Engineering Using Cilium
Designing, Operating, and Scaling Cloud-Native Observability with eBPF, Kubernetes, Hubble, and Tetragon
Modern cloud-native systems are fast, distributed, and dynamic-but they are also opaque, complex, and increasingly difficult to operate safely at scale. Traditional monitoring tools fail to keep up with microservices, ephemeral workloads, multi-cluster Kubernetes, and hybrid cloud environments. To survive and compete in the era of cloud native, platform engineering, AI, and zero-trust security, observability is no longer optional-it is foundational.
Observability Engineering using Cilium is a definitive, production-grade guide to building and operating next-generation observability platforms using eBPF-powered technologies. This book goes far beyond dashboards and alerts, teaching you how to design observability as a first-class platform capability-deeply embedded into networking, security, and runtime behavior.
Built around Cilium, the de-facto cloud-native networking and observability platform, this book shows how to leverage eBPF, Hubble, and Tetragon to gain real-time, kernel-level visibility across Kubernetes clusters-without invasive application instrumentation or performance penalties.
You will learn how modern observability works from the Linux kernel up, how network flows and runtime events become powerful observability signals, and how to correlate metrics, logs, traces, flows, and security events into a unified, actionable system. The book blends systems thinking, economics, and organizational reality with deep technical insight, helping you avoid common observability anti-patterns such as over-instrumentation, tool sprawl, and signal dilution.
Rather than focusing only on tools, this book teaches you how to design observability systems that scale, adapt, and age well-supporting migrations from legacy monitoring to cloud-native platforms, multi-cluster growth, and evolving security and compliance requirements. What You Will Learn
- How cloud-native architectures fundamentally change observability requirements
- Why eBPF transforms networking, security, and platform observability
- How Cilium provides observability without sidecars or application code changes
- Flow-based observability with Hubble for service dependency mapping and troubleshooting
- Runtime security observability with Tetragon for detection, forensics, and auditability
- How to integrate Cilium observability with Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Pixie, Splunk, and Cribl
- Designing cost-aware telemetry pipelines with high signal-to-noise ratios
- Operating, scaling, tuning, and governing observability platforms in production
- Observability maturity models, KPIs, and long-term platform strategy
Who This Book Is For
This book is written for platform engineers, SREs, Kubernetes operators, cloud architects, security engineers, and technical leaders (CTOs, CISOs, and CIOs) who want to design, operate, and scale modern observability platforms with confidence. Readers should have a working knowledge of Kubernetes and cloud-native systems, but deep expertise in eBPF is not required.
Whether you are modernizing legacy monitoring, building a new platform from scratch, or operating large-scale Kubernetes environments, Observability Engineering using Cilium provides the mental models, architectural patterns, and operational playbooks needed to turn observability into a strategic advantage.
This is not just a book about observability tools-it is a guide to observability engineering as a discipline.
