What is Skydive used for?

Skydive is a free, Apache-licensed, open-source real-time network topology and protocol analyzer that captures and visualizes flows across VMs, containers and SDN infrastructure. It is a good fit for visualizing network topology across VMs and containers, and troubleshooting traffic flows in SDN environments.

Is Skydive open source?

Yes. Skydive is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at skydive-project/skydive and is written mainly in Go.

Yes. Skydive is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host Skydive?

Yes. Skydive can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.

What is Skydive an alternative to?

Skydive is an open-source alternative to Kentik.

Is Skydive actively maintained?

The most recent commit to Skydive was on 19 September 2025, and the latest release is v0.28.0, published on 17 August 2021. The project has 2.8k stars on GitHub.

Skydive: open-source alternative to Kentik

About Skydive

Skydive is a real-time network topology and protocol analyzer aimed at network and infrastructure teams who need to understand what is actually happening across a complex network, including virtual machines, containers and software-defined networking layers, rather than relying only on static diagrams.

Distributed Skydive agents collect topology information and traffic flows and forward them to a central analyzer, with all information stored in an Elasticsearch database for later querying. It supports following a flow along its path through the topology, a unified Gremlin-based query language covering both topology and flows, and connectors for OpenStack, Docker, OpenContrail and Kubernetes, while remaining SDN-agnostic with optional SDN-specific drivers.

Skydive offers a web UI, a command-line client and a REST API, and can be deployed as a standalone all-in-one binary, through Helm on Kubernetes, or with Docker and Docker Compose for a fuller setup including Elasticsearch. It is written in Go and released under the Apache-2.0 license.

Key features

Real-time network topology capture
Flow tracking along the topology path
Unified Gremlin query language
OpenStack, Docker and Kubernetes connectors
Web UI, CLI and REST API
Elasticsearch-backed history storage

Good fit for

→Visualizing network topology across VMs and containers
→Troubleshooting traffic flows in SDN environments

Built with: Go
Tags: networking; network-topology; traffic-analysis; golang; kubernetes; packet-analyzer; self-hosted

Skydive: questions and answers

What is Skydive used for?: Skydive is a free, Apache-licensed, open-source real-time network topology and protocol analyzer that captures and visualizes flows across VMs, containers and SDN infrastructure. It is a good fit for visualizing network topology across VMs and containers, and troubleshooting traffic flows in SDN environments.
Is Skydive open source?: Yes. Skydive is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at skydive-project/skydive and is written mainly in Go.
Is Skydive free?: Yes. Skydive is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host Skydive?: Yes. Skydive can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.
What is Skydive an alternative to?: Skydive is an open-source alternative to Kentik.
Is Skydive actively maintained?: The most recent commit to Skydive was on 19 September 2025, and the latest release is v0.28.0, published on 17 August 2021. The project has 2.8k stars on GitHub.