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Concepts

Making Kubernetes Network Policies Observable with Logs

Andrios Robert

• 1 min read

Kubernetes Network Policies give you control over which pods and namespaces can talk to each other. They enforce rules at the network layer, closing paths you don’t intend and reducing your attack surface. But rules alone are blind. Without logs, you can’t tell if a policy is blocking traffic you expect, or allowing more than it should.

Network policy logs expose the reality of what your cluster is doing. With them, you can verify that ingress and egress behave exactly as intended. You can catch misconfigurations immediately. You can trace a denied connection back to its source, or prove compliance during an audit.

Capturing these logs requires instrumentation. Kubernetes itself does not log network policy events natively. You need a CNI plugin or proxy that supports this feature. Calico can log policy decisions. Cilium can export flow logs. Envoy, deployed as a sidecar or as an ingress/egress proxy, can capture rich layer 4 and layer 7 details.

A proxy between services can also enforce rules in real time. It becomes both the gatekeeper and the recorder. With the right configuration, every allowed or denied request is written to a central destination where you can search and alert on it. This means your Network Policies are no longer invisible—they are observable, testable, and provable.

The workflow is clear:

  1. Define Kubernetes Network Policies to lock down pod-to-pod and pod-to-external traffic.
  2. Deploy a CNI with policy enforcement and logging enabled, or place a proxy in the request path.
  3. Stream logs to a system where you can search by source, destination, namespace, or policy name.
  4. Review logs after each change to verify expected behavior.

Visibility transforms security from guesswork to certainty. Once you have deep logs tied to your Network Policies, you can refine them, tighten access, and prove control to anyone who asks.

See how this works without building it from scratch—use hoop.dev to spin up Kubernetes Network Policies with full logs and proxy access, live in minutes.