Announcing IP Address Insights on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

We’re pleased to announce the general availability of IP Address Insights on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This free service enables you to monitor and manage your IP addresses on OCI by providing a regional view of IP address usage (both IPv4 and IPv6) across your tenancy with hierarchical visibility into virtual cloud networks (VCNs), their subnets, and network resources.

Do you want to explore IP address insights? You can find it in the Oracle Cloud Console, accessing the navigation menu, and selecting Networking, IP management, and then IP address insights. This feature is available globally across all OCI realms.

Use cases

IP address insights is a centralized source of truth that allows you to plan, track, and manage your IP address space on OCI. Using IP address insights gives you the following capabilities:

• Gain a consolidated view of IP addresses used across your tenancy on a per region basis. The IP address insights table is a centralized table that enables a hierarchical view of all VCNs, subnets, and the compute and networking resources that exist in your tenancy within a region.

• Correlate private IPv4 addresses with their corresponding public IPv4 address. New to each subnet is an IP address insights table that allows you to see all the devices consuming IP addresses in your subnet. In this table, we provide information at a quick glance for all devices in your subnet, including the private IP and public IP addresses (if applicable) for every device.

• Determine the IP utilization of your OCI IP CIDR ranges. You can use IP address insights to explore data on IP utilization to identify potential utilization issues, such as overutilization and underutilization of IP addresses. You can also use IP address insights to determine which assets you have deployed in your VCN and subnet and their corresponding public and private IP addresses.

• Find IP overlapping conflicts. With our quick glance column in the IP address insights table, we make it easy for you to determine if any IP address overlaps are present in your OCI Tenancy and then guide you to determine which VCN or subnets are triggering the overlaps so that you can act.

• Create and manage alarms when IP utilization crosses a threshold. Having information is power. Having a way to act on it is even better. With IP address insights, we’ve created a way for you to set thresholds based on utilization, and then send an alert when a threshold is crossed.

• Search for resources by IP address, resource name, or device type with string search. We’ve included a search bar that allows you to cut to the chase and avoid looking through rows of data by using the IP inventory search bar. The search is based on any string that exists in your IP address insights table. For example, you can search based on an IP address of your compute instance or the name of a network load balancer.

See a consolidated view of all OCI IP address resources

IP address insights allows you view the IP address CIDRs (both IPv4 and IPv6), which are used across your tenancy and obtain hierarchical visibility into VCNs, subnets, and the associated network and compute resources which reside in your tenancy. For each row (VCN), you have the option to expand and see subnet-level utilization and resources, such as virtual machine (VM) instances and load balancers. Each has a column that displays the VCN CIDR utilization, overlap information, DNS domain, DNS hostnames, and the compartment where the resource resides. In the navigation menu, under Networking, select IP management and then IP address insights.

Correlate private and public IPv4 addresses for your devices

With the main IP address insights screen, we’ve also added IP inventory tables for each subnet in your VCN. You can now view IP addresses consumed by resources in your subnet. The subnet-level IP address insights table provides DNS information, the private IP address, and the public IP address associated with the VM instances and network resources in your subnet.

Determine IP utilization

Lack of visibility into IP CIDR utilization is a common issue that customers run into while deploying applications on the cloud. Whenever you deploy VCNs into OCI, you must choose an IP CIDR block that you can divide into smaller IP CIDR blocks for your subnets. These IP addresses are consumed by compute, container, and network devices that exist in your subnet and VCN. The Utilization column displays the percentage of IPv4 prefix utilization at both the VCN and subnet level. You can sort the Utilization column by both highest and lowest percentage.

You can also specify a utilization percentage filter for the entire table. In the following example, we specified that we only want to see VCNs with a utilization above 50%. This filtering comes in handy when you have a large number of VCNs but only want to see those with a certain level of utilization.

Finding overlapping conflicts

When customers deploy the same IP prefix more than once in the same network, an IP overlap occurs. This overlap can be a problem. For example, we’ve deployed the 10.1.1.0/24 to two subnets. Devices in each of those respective subnets can’t communicate with each other. Perhaps, and more importantly, communication from outside of OCI to applications in these two subnets might also be broken because some traffic is routed to the devices in the first subnet with the conflicting range, while other traffic is routed to devices in the second subnet.

With IP address insights, overlaps at both the VCN and subnet level are detected and highlighted. In the following example table, we have five overlaps detected. Selecting the overlaps link opens a panel that highlights the CIDR block, prefix, and VCNs that contain the overlapping CIDRs.

Create and manage alarms

Customers frequently run into problems relating to both over and underutilization for their cloud resources. If you don’t have enough IP addresses in your VCN and subnets, you run out of space to deploy more application resources. If you underutilize your IP addresses deployed, you’re wasting valuable address space that might be needed elsewhere.

By enabling you to set thresholds and send alarms when a threshold is crossed, OCI is empowers you to stay better informed around IP capacity for your cloud-based applications. In the navigation menu, under Networking, select Virtual cloud networks, your VCN, Subnet Details, and then IP address insights.

The Alarms tab allows you to create alarms and notifications if the IP utilization reaches a specified percentage of IP utilization per subnet. You have a great amount of flexibility in how you create alarms. With the alarm severity, you can choose the statistic used to trigger the alarm. In the following example, we create an alarm to let us know if we see utilization above a maximum of 20%. So, an alarm triggers when the highest value observed during the period is 20% or greater. When triggered, the alarm is sent to the subscription that you have selected.

Search for resources

Finding exactly what you’re looking for can be harder than it needs to be at times. That’s why we included a search function directly into the IP address insights table itself. The IP address insights search bar allows you to perform string searches that examine all fields in the network load balancer inventory table. In the following example, a user wants to know where they deployed their NLB and its IP address. By typing “nlb” in the search bar, the IP address insights table highlights all instances of “nlb” anywhere in the IP inventory table and display it. In the results, we bolded the text that was found for easier visibility.

Conclusion

We believe that IP address can enhance and simplify how you manage your IP address allocations within on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and look forward to hearing how these features improve your network design and solution development. To learn more about IP inventory, visit the documentation.