Operations Overview

This chapter covers the first operational checks for Nantian Gateway and points to the deeper metrics, Grafana, alerting, troubleshooting, and backup pages.

Nantian Gateway is mostly stateless. Kubernetes resources are the source of truth, the control plane rebuilds routing state from the Kubernetes API, and the data plane receives runtime snapshots over gRPC/xDS. Start operations work by checking Kubernetes status, route attachment, control plane logs, data plane logs, metrics, and admin endpoints.

First Checks After Install

Run these checks before debugging individual routes:

kubectl get pods -n nantian-gw
kubectl get gatewayclass nantian-gw
kubectl get svc -n nantian-gw
kubectl logs -n nantian-gw deploy/nantian-gw-controlplane --tail=100
kubectl logs -n nantian-gw deploy/nantian-gw-dataplane --tail=100

Interpret the result in this order:

Check	What To Look For	Meaning
Pods	Control plane and data plane pods are Running and ready.	Workloads are scheduled, probes are passing, and the data plane has completed startup.
GatewayClass	nantian-gw exists and uses controller gateway.networking.k8s.io/nantian-gw.	The chart installed the class that application Gateway objects should reference.
Services	Fixed service names and ports match the table below.	Other components and operators can use stable in-cluster addresses.
Control plane logs	Reconciliation, status, snapshot, or xDS messages.	The control plane is watching resources and publishing state.
Data plane logs	xDS connection and configuration-apply messages.	The data plane is connected and has received runtime configuration.

Helm Service Reference

The fixed services created by the Helm chart are:

Service	Port	Purpose
nantian-gw-controlplane-grpc	18080	Data plane xDS/gRPC connection.
nantian-gw-controlplane-admin	18081	Control plane admin API.
nantian-gw-controlplane-metrics	18082	Control plane Prometheus metrics.
nantian-gw-dataplane-admin	19080	Data plane admin API.
nantian-gw-dataplane-metrics	19080	Data plane metrics scrape entry.
nantian-gw-dashboard	3000	Dashboard web UI.

The data plane runtime HTTP listener is configured as 0.0.0.0:10080. Port-forward the deployment for local route tests:

kubectl port-forward -n nantian-gw deploy/nantian-gw-dataplane 10080:10080

Logs

Use Deployment targets for quick inspection:

kubectl logs -n nantian-gw deploy/nantian-gw-controlplane --tail=100
kubectl logs -n nantian-gw deploy/nantian-gw-dataplane --tail=100

For a specific pod:

kubectl get pods -n nantian-gw
kubectl logs -n nantian-gw pod/<pod-name> --tail=200

Set debug logging only for short investigations. Debug output can be large and should not remain enabled in production.

Metrics And Admin Access

Forward control plane admin and metrics services when inspecting locally:

kubectl port-forward -n nantian-gw svc/nantian-gw-controlplane-admin 18081:18081
kubectl port-forward -n nantian-gw svc/nantian-gw-controlplane-metrics 18082:18082

Then query:

curl -s http://localhost:18081/livez
curl -s http://localhost:18081/readyz
curl -s http://localhost:18082/metrics | head

Forward the data plane admin service when you need data plane runtime details:

kubectl port-forward -n nantian-gw svc/nantian-gw-dataplane-admin 19080:19080
curl -s http://localhost:19080/livez
curl -s http://localhost:19080/readyz

Prometheus Operator ServiceMonitor resources are disabled by default in the Helm chart. Enable them only when the Prometheus Operator CRDs are installed and NetworkPolicies allow the Prometheus namespace to scrape the metrics services.

Route-Level Checks

When a route does not work, inspect status before testing traffic:

kubectl get gateway,httproute -A
kubectl describe gateway <gateway-name> -n <namespace>
kubectl describe httproute <route-name> -n <namespace>

Look for accepted parents, listener matches, backend reference resolution, and status conditions. A route that is not attached will not receive traffic even if the data plane is healthy.

Common Operations

Restart stateless components with rolling updates:

kubectl rollout restart deployment/nantian-gw-controlplane -n nantian-gw
kubectl rollout restart deployment/nantian-gw-dataplane -n nantian-gw

Scale the data plane when traffic or resource pressure requires it:

kubectl scale deployment/nantian-gw-dataplane -n nantian-gw --replicas=4

Watch rollout status:

kubectl rollout status deployment/nantian-gw-controlplane -n nantian-gw
kubectl rollout status deployment/nantian-gw-dataplane -n nantian-gw

Chapter Structure

Page	Covers
Metrics Reference	Prometheus metrics emitted by the control plane and data plane.
Grafana Dashboard	How to import and use the bundled dashboard assets.
Alerting Rules	Recommended Prometheus alert rules.
Troubleshooting	Common symptoms and diagnostic flows.
Backup & Recovery	What to back up and how to restore gateway configuration.