Administration interface¶

Envoy exposes a local administration interface that can be used to query and modify different aspects of the server:

Attention

The administration interface in its current form both allows destructive operations to be performed (e.g., shutting down the server) as well as potentially exposes private information (e.g., stats, cluster names, cert info, etc.). It is critical that access to the administration interface is only allowed via a secure network. It is also critical that hosts that access the administration interface are only attached to the secure network (i.e., to avoid CSRF attacks). This involves setting up an appropriate firewall or optimally only allowing access to the administration listener via localhost. This can be accomplished with a v2 configuration like the following:

admin:
  access_log_path: /tmp/admin_access.log
  address:
    socket_address: { address: 127.0.0.1, port_value: 9901 }

In the future additional security options will be added to the administration interface. This work is tracked in this issue.

GET /¶: Render an HTML home page with a table of links to all available options.

GET /help¶: Print a textual table of all available options.

GET /certs¶: List out all loaded TLS certificates, including file name, serial number, and days until expiration.

GET /clusters¶

List out all configured cluster manager clusters. This information includes all discovered upstream hosts in each cluster along with per host statistics. This is useful for debugging service discovery issues.

Cluster manager information

version_info string – the version info string of the last loaded CDS update. If envoy does not have CDS setup, the output will read version_info::static.

Cluster wide information

circuit breakers settings for all priority settings.
Information about outlier detection if a detector is installed. Currently success rate average, and ejection threshold are presented. Both of these values could be -1 if there was not enough data to calculate them in the last interval.
added_via_api flag – false if the cluster was added via static configuration, true if it was added via the CDS api.

Per host statistics

Name	Type	Description
cx_total	Counter	Total connections
cx_active	Gauge	Total active connections
cx_connect_fail	Counter	Total connection failures
rq_total	Counter	Total requests
rq_timeout	Counter	Total timed out requests
rq_success	Counter	Total requests with non-5xx responses
rq_error	Counter	Total requests with 5xx responses
rq_active	Gauge	Total active requests
healthy	String	The health status of the host. See below
weight	Integer	Load balancing weight (1-100)
zone	String	Service zone
canary	Boolean	Whether the host is a canary
success_rate	Double	Request success rate (0-100). -1 if there was not enough request volume in the interval to calculate it

Host health status

A host is either healthy or unhealthy because of one or more different failing health states. If the host is healthy the healthy output will be equal to healthy.

If the host is not healthy, the healthy output will be composed of one or more of the following strings:

/failed_active_hc: The host has failed an active health check.

/failed_outlier_check: The host has failed an outlier detection check.

GET /cpuprofiler¶: Enable or disable the CPU profiler. Requires compiling with gperftools.

GET /healthcheck/fail¶: Fail inbound health checks. This requires the use of the HTTP health check filter. This is useful for draining a server prior to shutting it down or doing a full restart. Invoking this command will universally fail health check requests regardless of how the filter is configured (pass through, etc.).

GET /healthcheck/ok¶: Negate the effect of GET /healthcheck/fail. This requires the use of the HTTP health check filter.

GET /hot_restart_version¶: See --hot-restart-version.

GET /logging¶: Enable/disable different logging levels on different subcomponents. Generally only used during development.

GET /quitquitquit¶: Cleanly exit the server.

GET /reset_counters¶: Reset all counters to zero. This is useful along with GET /stats during debugging. Note that this does not drop any data sent to statsd. It just effects local output of the GET /stats command.

GET /routes?route_config_name=<name>¶: This endpoint is only available if envoy has HTTP routes configured via RDS. The endpoint dumps all the configured HTTP route tables, or only ones that match the route_config_name query, if a query is specified.

GET /server_info¶: Outputs information about the running server. Sample output looks like:

envoy 267724/RELEASE live 1571 1571 0

The fields are:

Process name
Compiled SHA and build type
Health check state (live or draining)
Current hot restart epoch uptime in seconds
Total uptime in seconds (across all hot restarts)
Current hot restart epoch

GET /stats¶

Outputs all statistics on demand. This includes only counters and gauges. Histograms are not output as Envoy currently has no built in histogram support and relies on statsd for aggregation. This command is very useful for local debugging. See here for more information.

GET /stats?format=json¶

Outputs /stats in JSON format. This can be used for programmatic access of stats.

GET /stats?format=prometheus¶

Outputs /stats in Prometheus v0.0.4 format. This can be used to integrate with a Prometheus server. Currently, only counters and gauges are output. Histograms will be output in a future update.

GET /runtime¶

Outputs all runtime values on demand in a human-readable format. See here for more information on how these values are configured and utilized.

GET /runtime?format=json¶

Outputs /runtime in JSON format. This can be used for programmatic access of runtime values.