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fix: log each agent message once, and skip untracked sockets before the map lookup - #358

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mayankpande88 merged 12 commits into
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fix/log-once-and-fallback-filter
Oct 6, 2026
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mayankpande88 merged 12 commits into
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fix/log-once-and-fallback-filter

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Summary

Two small fixes found while profiling the agent under TLS load:

  • Each log message is written once. klog.SetOutput gives every severity the same writer, and klog writes a message to its own severity's writer and to every lower one's. So each warning was logged twice and each error three times. klog's one_output flag writes it once.
  • Untracked sockets are skipped before the kernel map lookup. createConnectionFromSocketInfo parsed the socket tuple and looked up the kernel's NAT map before applying the connection filters. A TLS server's accepted sockets have a client's ephemeral port as their destination, are never tracked, and came through this path on every read and write the server made. The port filter now runs first; connectionKey still applies it, so nothing else changes.
Engineering detail

Local e2e: built agent images from this branch and its parent and ran each in a local Docker VM (kernel 6.10) behind a Go HTTPS/2 server serving 8 parallel 64 MB downloads, with a 20s CPU profile mid-load. Parent: 14 warning lines, 7 distinct (every warning twice); createConnectionFromSocketInfo 8.8% of agent CPU, 7.8% of it in the NAT map lookup. This branch: every warning line distinct, and createConnectionFromSocketInfo absent from the profile. golangci-lint and the containers tests pass.

TLS capture could fail at attach time, in the kernel, or in the agent with
nothing to show for it at default verbosity. This adds counters for each
stage and fixes the losses they revealed.

Visibility:
- node_agent_tls_attach_total{lib,result} for every attach attempt, and
  one log line per binary and outcome instead of one per process.
- node_agent_tls_plaintext_dropped_total{reason}: TLS plaintext a library
  hook saw but could not attribute to a socket.
- node_agent_l7_ringbuf_drops_total: L7 events lost to a full ring buffer.
- node_agent_l7_events_dropped_total{reason,protocol,tls}: events dropped
  in the agent before protocol parsing.

Fixes:
- Register a process on its first socket event, so its first connection
  is tracked and its TLS probes attach before its first request.
- Give a connection built from an event's socket tuple the event's
  timestamp, and let a newer event replace the closed predecessor on a
  reused fd. Both cases used to be dropped as stale.
- Key the cache of binaries that cannot be probed by file identity, not
  by path, which is only meaningful inside one container.
- Re-attach after a process execs a different binary.
- Only a write that starts with a TLS record may claim pending OpenSSL
  plaintext, and that write's ciphertext now counts toward bytes sent.
- Guard Process state shared between the instrumentation goroutine, the
  event loop and the scrape path.
Collect read c.pythonStats and c.nodejsStats without c.lock while the
registry's event loop updates them under it.
… tuples

A connection created from an L7 event's socket tuple, because the event
arrived before the connection's open event, skipped the filters and the
NAT resolution onConnectionOpen applies. With these connections now kept
(previous commit), that tracked traffic to ignored destinations and
labelled requests with a service's virtual IP as their actual destination.

- Both paths now share connectionKey: the same port, loopback, ignored
  workload and connection filters, and the same destination key.
- The socket-tuple path takes the actual destination from the kernel's
  conntrack-derived actual_destinations map, as open events do.
- An exec is re-checked on every new socket, not only when a throttle
  shared with the periodic sweep allows it.
- The go_fd_unknown help text says it includes TLS over in-memory
  connections, which have no socket.
… wrapped Go connections (#354)

* feat(tls): attribute TLS plaintext losses to the container and binary

node_agent_tls_plaintext_dropped_total says how much TLS plaintext the
kernel could not attribute to a socket, but not which process it came
from, so a loss could not be traced to a workload without a debug build.

- The TLS library uprobes also count losses per process and reason in an
  LRU map. The syscall programs are left alone.
- The agent reads and clears those counts every stats tick, and drains a
  process's entries when it exits, since a short-lived process is gone
  before the next tick.
- container_tls_plaintext_dropped_total{reason} counts them per container.
- The first loss per binary and reason is logged once as a warning, naming
  the executable and what the reason usually means.

* fix(ebpf): find the socket behind wrapped Go connections

The Go TLS probe found a connection's socket only if crypto/tls ran
directly over *net.TCPConn, or over a wrapper embedding the connection
at offset 0, one level deep. Proxies and scrapers wrap deeper. One
reverse proxy's TLS connections are three wrappers deep, each embedding
the next at offset 0. A scraper's wrapper puts an int32 counter before
the embedded net.Conn, at offset 8. All of their TLS plaintext was
dropped.

The probe now descends up to four levels, taking the embedded net.Conn
at offset 0 or 8. A level is accepted when its type is the binary's
*net.TCPConn itab. Otherwise, as in stripped binaries, or PIE binaries
whose symbol table holds the itab unrelocated, the fd it yields is
accepted only if it names an IPv4 or IPv6 socket of the process. gRPC's
syscallConn has the same shape and goes through the same walk. TLS over
in-memory connections still has no socket and is still counted as
go_fd_unknown.

* fix(tls): log drops of unknown processes once per container, not once per node

An unknown process has no executable identity, so its log key was the
zero value and the first such warning on a node silenced the rest. Also
name the per-pid drop map key type.
…es it

HTTP/2 parsers are keyed by pid+fd alone. When a recycled fd got a new
connection, either from its open event or from an L7 event that arrived
first, the new connection inherited the previous one's parser and its
HPACK dynamic table. Its headers then failed to decode, or decoded wrong.

The parser is now dropped when the fd's connection is replaced. A parser
already tagged with the new connection's timestamp is kept: it was created
for this connection by an L7 event that beat the open event.
A level of the walk that was not a *net.TCPConn was still read as one. For a
wrapper struct the first word is an itab pointer, so the "Sysfd" read was the
itab's type hash, and when a value read that way named another live socket of
the process, the socket check accepted it: the session's plaintext went to
that connection, and it was marked TLS, every time, for that binary. On
kernels without BTF the socket check was skipped, so all four levels were
trusted unchecked.

A level found without the itab must now point to a net.netFD whose family is
AF_INET or AF_INET6 and whose sotype is SOCK_STREAM. The check reads only the
application's memory, so it holds without kernel BTF. Where the kernel's
struct offsets are known, the fd must also be a SOCK_STREAM socket of that
family. The netFD offsets come from DWARF and default to 56 and 64, which
Go 1.17 through 1.26 share. The walk no longer reads the gRPC syscallConn
itab, so its discovery is gone.

New metrics make the kernel-dependent part visible:
- node_agent_go_tls_fd_resolved_total{method,depth}: method is itab, socket
  (netFD check plus kernel check) or shape (netFD check only, no BTF)
- node_agent_ebpf_info{program_variant,btf,socket_offsets}
- node_agent_ebpf_program_instructions and
  node_agent_ebpf_program_verified_instructions, per program

TestProgramsLoad loads the variant the running kernel gets and logs each
program's size and verifier cost. TestGoTLSFdWalk runs TLS over a plain, a
wrapped and a decoy connection and checks which socket each one is
attributed to. Both need root and VM=1.
…onnection takes its fd

A parser without a connection timestamp was created by events from a socket
the kernel was not tracking, such as a connection older than the agent. A
connection opening on its fd is tracked, and the kernel stamps every event of
a tracked connection with its timestamp, so the parser cannot be the new
connection's. It was kept, and the new connection inherited its HPACK table.
…dropped (#355)

* feat(tls): attach Go TLS probes at exec, and log where L7 events are dropped

A process's Go TLS probes were attached on its first connection, after
its connect event had been read. That was late for short-lived programs:
many exited first, and the rest had made their first requests unprobed.
A program that a wrapper exec'd kept probes for the wrapper's binary until
a throttled re-check noticed the change.

- A sched_process_exec tracepoint reports execs. The agent attaches Go
  TLS probes for the new image at once, and drops those of the old one.
  OpenSSL is still attached on the first connection, because the loader
  maps libssl after the exec.
- Process events are read every 10 ms, like connect events, instead of
  every 100 ms.
- The periodic executable re-check stays as a fallback for lost exec
  events, at a 10 s interval.
- Every L7 event dropped before parsing is logged once per container,
  reason and protocol, with the pid, fd and destination, so the counter's
  reasons can be traced to a workload.

* fix(containers): report L7 events on non-IP sockets as no_ip_socket

Events on sockets without an IP tuple, such as gRPC over a Unix socket,
were counted as unknown_connection, which reads as a capture loss. The
agent does not track those sockets, so they now get their own reason.

* chore(ebpf): regenerate ebpf.go after rebasing onto the review fixes
…he map lookup

klog.SetOutput hands every severity the same writer, and klog writes a
message to its own severity's writer and to every lower one's, so each
warning reached the log twice and each error three times. one_output
writes it once.

createConnectionFromSocketInfo parsed the socket tuple and looked up the
kernel's NAT map before applying the connection filters. A TLS server's
accepted sockets have a client's ephemeral port as their destination,
are never tracked, and came through this path on every read and write
the server made. The port filter is now checked first.

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Code Review

This pull request introduces performance and logging improvements. In containers/container.go, a port filtering check is added early in createConnectionFromSocketInfo to skip parsing and kernel map lookups for skipped ports, optimizing performance for common cases like TLS server connections. In main.go, the one_output flag is set to true for klog to prevent duplicate log messages when a single writer is used for all log severities. I have no feedback to provide.

Base automatically changed from fix/tls-capture-gaps to main October 6, 2026 04:48
main's tree equals the #353 branch this was built on, so this keeps the
branch's tree and only records the merge.
@mayankpande88
mayankpande88 merged commit 75d37fa into main Oct 6, 2026
7 checks passed
@mayankpande88
mayankpande88 deleted the fix/log-once-and-fallback-filter branch October 6, 2026 08:29
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3 participants