Starship

⚠️ Starship is in active development; it’s unstable, and should only be used for evaluation ⚠️

🖖 Starship 🪐 is a next-generation Observability platform built on 🐝 eBPF➕WASM

🚀 Starship is to modern Observability, as ChatGPT is to consumer knowledge discovery. 🐝 eBPF enables instrumentation-free data collection, and WASM complements eBPF’s inability to perform complex data processing.

Starship is developed by Tricorder Observability, proudly supported by MiraclePlus and the Open Source community.

GitHub issues GitHub pull requests

Building Starship

The easiest way to get started with building Starship is to use the dev image:

git clone git@github.com:<fork>/Starship.git
cd Starship
# Luanch dev image container
devops/dev_image/run.sh
# Inside the container
bazel build src/...

devops/dev_image/run.sh mounts the pwd (which is the root of the cloned Starship repo) to /starship inside the dev image.

Get Started

☸️ Helm-charts, install Starship on your Kubernetes cluster with helm.

We recommend Minikube v1.29.0 or newer.

minikube version
$ minikube version: v1.29.0
$ commit: ddac20b4b34a9c8c857fc602203b6ba2679794d3

# First start the minikube cluster, and make sure have at least 8 cpus and
# 8196 MB memory.
minikube start --profile=${USER} --cpus=8 --memory=8192

# Create a namespace for installing Starship.
# Do not use a different namespace, as our documentation uses this namespace
# consistently, and you might run into unexpected issues with a different
# namespace.
kubectl create namespace tricorder
kubectl config set-context --current --namespace=tricorder

# Add Starship's helm-charts and install Starship
helm repo add tricorder-starship https://tricorder-observability.github.io/Starship
helm install my-starship tricorder-starship/starship

You should see the following pods running on your cluster.

More details can be found at helm-charts installation.

Then follow the CLI build and install to install starship-cli.

Then expose the API Server http endpoint with kubectl port-forward:

# This allows starship-cli accessing API Server with
# --api-address=localhost:8081
kubectl port-forward service/api-server 8081:80 -n tricorder

DO NOT use the Web UI, as it’s not working right now issue/#80.

Then make sure you are the root of the Starship repo, and create a pre-built module:

starship-cli --api-address localhost:8081 module create \
    --bcc-file-path=modules/ddos_event/ddos_event.bcc \
    --wasm-file-path=modules/ddos_event/write_events_to_output.wasm \
    --module-json-path=modules/ddos_event/module.json

Then deploy this module:

starship-cli --api-address=localhost:8081 module deploy -i 0aa9e5db_ffce_4276_b37e_0b2dd82814a1

starship-cli --api-address=localhost:8081 module deploy -i 0aa9e5db_ffce_4276_b37e_0b2dd82814a1
kubectl port-forward service/my-starship-grafana 8082:80 -n tricorder

Then open http://localhost:8082, login Grafana with username admin and password tricorder. Then click the Dashboards->Browse, and then select the dashboard named tricorder_<module_id>. You should see data reporting packets arriving with timestamp, as shown in the screenshot below.

Not yet very useful. We are working tirelessly 👩‍👨‍💻💻 on micro-service tracing! Stay tuned! 🫶

Architecture

🤿 Before diving into the code base:

Starship is built for Kubernetes platform. Starship provides all things you’ll need to get started with Zero-Cost (or Zero-Friction) Observability.
Starship provides Service Map, the most valuable information for understanding Cloud Native applications, and numerous other data, analytic, and visualization capabilities to satisfy the full spectrum of your needs in running and managing Cloud Native applications on Kubernetes.
The core of starship is the tricorder agent, which runs data collection modules written in your favorite language, and are executed in eBPF+WASM. You can write your own modules in C/C++ (Go, Rust, and more languages are coming).

We are working on supporting all major frontend languages of writing eBPF programs, including:

Additionally, libbpf-style eBPF binary object files are supported as well.

Components

Starship Tricorder (aka. Starship Agent): a data collection agent running as daemonset. Agent executes eBPF+WASM modules and export structured data to storage engine. The code lives in src/agent.
Starship API Server: manages Tricorder agents, and Promscale & Grafana backend server; also supports management Web UI and CLI. The code lives in src/api-server.
Starship CLI: the command line tool to use Starship on your Kubernetes cluster. The code lives in src/cli.
Starship Web UI: a Web UI for using Starship. The code lives in ui.

3rd party dependencies

Promscale: A unified metric and trace observability backend for Prometheus & OpenTelemetry. Starship use Promscale to support Prom and OTel.
Grafana: Starship use Grafana to visualize Observability data.

Prepherials

Kube-state-metrics (KSM): listens to the Kubernetes API server and generates metrics about the state of the objects. Starship use KSM to expose cluster-level metrics.
Prometheus: collects metrics from KSM and then remote write to Promscale.
OpenTelemetry: for distributed tracing and other awesome Observability features.

Contributing

Overview

Fork the repo
Createing Pull Request
Ask for review

Provision development environment on localhost

You can use Ansible to provision development environment on your localhost. First install ansible:

sudo apt-get install ansible-core -y
git clone git@github.com:tricorder-observability/starship.git
cd starship
sudo devops/dev_image/ansible-playbook.sh devops/dev_image/dev.yaml

This installs a list of apt packages, and downloads and installs a list of other tools from online.

Afterwards, you need source the env var file to pick up the PATH environment variable (or put this into your shell’s rc file):

source devops/dev_image/env.inc

Afterwards, run bazel build src/... to build all targets in the Starship repo.

Creating Pull Requests

After making changes, run tools/cleanup.sh to cleanup the codebase, and then push the changes to the forked repo, and create Pull Request on github Web UI.

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