ON/OFF Switch (Dormant Feature)

Resource consumption (e.g., CPU and memory) is key in Kubernetes. Kubeshark’s resource consumption is linearly dependent on the amount of traffic it processes. There are many ways to control resource consumption, and this ON/OFF switch is one of them.

Stopping and starting traffic capturing enables controlling Kubeshark’s resource consumption. When traffic capture is stopped, Kubeshark is dormant in your cluster, processing no traffic and consuming almost no resources.

Kubeshark’s Helm template supports a Helm value named tap.stopped, which controls whether Kubeshark is in a stopped state or not.

Changing the Value Dynamically via the Dashboard

This value can be changed dynamically via the dashboard by pressing the Enable Traffic Capture button. You can also see an indication of the state of traffic capturing at the top fold.

Using a Helm Value

By setting --set tap.stopped=true, you’re instructing Kubeshark not to process any traffic by default, making it dormant in your cluster, ready to start once this value changes to false. When you want Kubeshark to process traffic continuously, flag should be set to false: --set tap.stopped=false. Or in the values.yaml:

tap:
    stopped: false

Default Configuration

The tap.stopped Helm value is set to true by default; however, you can change this by adding this value to your values.yaml file or by adding it to the CLI when running either Helm or the kubeshark CLI. As long as it is set to false, Kubeshark will start processing traffic from the get-go.