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Capture with CRD

This page describes how the Retina Capture CRD works.

See the overview for a description of how the capture jobs are created.

Overview of Retina Capture with operator

Prerequisites​

Usage​

You must create a YAML manifest file with the desired specifications and apply it to the cluster using kubectl apply.

  • If successful, the capture job should spin up after you apply.
  • If not successful, no job will spin up. You can troubleshoot by checking the status of the CRD with kubectl get capture <capture-crd-name> -o yaml.

The full specification for the Capture CRD can be found in the Capture CRD file.

Refer to the Capture CRD page for more details.

# Install Retina with Standard Control Plane and Operator enabled
> VERSION=$( curl -sL https://api.github.com/repos/microsoft/retina/releases/latest | jq -r .name)
helm upgrade --install retina oci://ghcr.io/microsoft/retina/charts/retina \
    --version $VERSION \
    --namespace kube-system \
    --set image.tag=$VERSION \
    --set operator.tag=$VERSION \
    --set logLevel=info \
    --set operator.enabled=true \
    --set enabledPlugin_linux="\[dropreason\,packetforward\,linuxutil\,dns\]"

Release "retina" does not exist. Installing it now.
Pulled: ghcr.io/microsoft/retina/charts/retina:v0.0.33
Digest: sha256:0d647b8c5090725684ad9bd0c9c988eccd4ee3cbf06a08a7270f362236057bd0
NAME: retina
LAST DEPLOYED: Fri May 30 09:01:57 2025
NAMESPACE: kube-system
STATUS: deployed
REVISION: 1
NOTES:
1. Installing retina service using helm: helm install retina ./deploy/standard/manifests/controller/helm/retina/ --namespace kube-system --dependency-update
2. Cleaning up/uninstalling/deleting retina and dependencies related:
  helm uninstall retina -n kube-system

# Apply the Capture configuration
> kubectl apply -f capture.yaml
capture.retina.sh/hubble-cp-capture created

# View the jobs which got created
> kubectl get jobs
NAME                        STATUS     COMPLETIONS   DURATION   AGE
standard-cp-capture-8r8sf   Complete   1/1           11s        4m31s
standard-cp-capture-sdtd7   Complete   1/1           11s        4m31s

Examples​

Node Selectors and Host Path output target

apiVersion: retina.sh/v1alpha1
kind: Capture
metadata:
  name: example-node-selectors
spec:
  captureConfiguration:
    captureOption:
      duration: "5s"
      maxCaptureSize: 100
      packetSize: 1500
    captureTarget:
      nodeSelector:
        matchLabels:
          kubernetes.io/os: linux
  outputConfiguration:
    hostPath: /captures

Include / Exclude filters

apiVersion: retina.sh/v1alpha1
kind: Capture
metadata:
  name: example-include-exclude-filters
spec:
  captureConfiguration:
    captureOption:
      duration: "5s"
      maxCaptureSize: 100
      packetSize: 1500
    captureTarget:
      nodeSelector:
        matchLabels:
          kubernetes.io/os: linux
    filters:
      include:
        - 10.224.0.42:80
        - 10.224.0.33:8080
      exclude:
        - 10.224.0.26:80
        - 10.224.0.34:8080
  outputConfiguration:
    hostPath: /captures

Additional examples can also be found in the GitHub capture samples.