Implement Traffic Mirroring

Traffic mirroring is a mechanism that duplicates the traffic flowing through the API gateway and forwards the duplicated traffic to a designated upstream, without interrupting the regular services. The mechanism benefits a few use cases, including troubleshooting, security inspection, analytics, and more.

This guide will walk you through the process of implementing traffic mirroring in APISIX using the proxy-mirror plugin.

Prerequisite(s)

• Install Docker.
• Install cURL to send requests to the services for validation.
• Follow the Getting Started tutorial to start a new APISIX instance in Docker.

Start Sample Service to Receive Mirrored Traffic

Start a sample NGINX server for receiving mirrored traffic:

docker run -p 8081:80 --name nginx nginx

You should see NGINX access log and error log on the terminal session.

Configure APISIX

Open a new terminal session. Save the IP address of your host to an environment variable:

HOST_IP=192.168.42.145   # replace with your host IP

Create a route with the proxy-mirror plugin and configure the address for mirrored traffic:

curl "http://127.0.0.1:9180/apisix/admin/routes" -X PUT -d '
{
  "id": "traffic-mirror-route",
  "uri": "/get",
  "plugins": {
    "proxy-mirror": {
      "host": "http://'"$HOST_IP"':8081"
    }
  },
  "upstream": {
    "nodes": {
      "httpbin.org": 1
    },
    "type": "roundrobin"
  }
}'

Verify Mirroring

Send a request to the route:

curl -i "http://127.0.0.1:9080/get"

You should receive an HTTP/1.1 200 OK response.

Navigating back to the NGINX terminal session, you should see the following access log entry:

172.17.0.1 - - [29/Jan/2024:23:11:01 +0000] "GET /get HTTP/1.1" 404 153 "-" "curl/7.64.1" "-"

The HTTP response status is 404 and expected, since the sample NGINX server does not implement the route. This verifies that APISIX has mirrored the request to the NGINX server.

Next Steps

You have now learned how to mirror all ingress traffic to a different upstream. The proxy-mirror plugin also supports mirroring partial traffic and customization on the mirroring timeout values. See plugin doc for more information.