November 2023 Summaries

Tailscale's integration with Datadog is now generally available, allowing users to stream Tailscale audit and network flow logs directly to Datadog, a leader in observability tools. This integration enables customers to utilize Datadog's out-of-the-box visualization and alerting features to monitor their network's health, detect anomalous traffic patterns, and analyze traffic flow within their tailnet. Users can configure recommended monitors to receive alerts for potential security threats, performance issues, and changes to sensitive settings. The system provides a comprehensive view of network activity, facilitating forensic analysis and enabling users to investigate specific traffic patterns, such as unusually high traffic on specific ports. The integration offers pre-configured monitors to warn users of sensitive changes or threshold breaches in traffic, ensuring robust network security and performance monitoring.

In an effort to enhance network performance, recent changes have been implemented to significantly improve UDP throughput on Linux, specifically benefiting the Tailscale network layer. Building on previous work that increased TCP throughput over wireguard-go, these updates leverage UDP segmentation offloads, enabling a 4x increase in UDP throughput on bare metal Linux and surpassing the in-kernel WireGuard implementation for now. This improvement is crucial as UDP usage rises with the adoption of HTTP/3 and the QUIC protocol, both of which require efficient real-time data transmission. The updates include enabling transport layer offloads and introducing tx-udp-segmentation, which allows "monster" UDP datagrams to pass through the stack, thus optimizing performance for UDP-based applications. Furthermore, considerations around CPU core states (C-States) have been addressed, demonstrating how the management of these states can impact throughput, particularly in forwarding scenarios. These enhancements are available in Tailscale v1.54 and are supported by ongoing reviews and illustrations from collaborators.

Tailscale has announced a new integration with Truffle Security's open-source secret scanning tool, TruffleHog, to enhance the security of its programmable network. This collaboration allows TruffleHog to scan for five types of Tailscale secrets—API keys, Pre-authentication keys, OAuth client secrets, SCIM keys, and webhook keys—across data sources, verify their activity status, and notify users to revoke them if necessary. The integration is part of Tailscale's commitment to a shared security model, ensuring that these keys remain secure within various infrastructure setups. This feature is available for both open-source and Enterprise versions of TruffleHog, with installation instructions provided in Truffle’s GitHub repository. For more detailed information, Tailscale and Truffle Security have shared insights about their collaboration in a dedicated blog post.

Tailscale has introduced several enhancements to its log streaming features, including the ability to stream logs securely to private endpoints within a tailnet, allowing users to bypass the public internet by directing logs to a node hosting their preferred security information and event management (SIEM) system. Additionally, Tailscale now supports Cribl for log streaming, offering users greater flexibility and control over their data by enabling routing to various destinations like storage services, ETL pipelines, or SIEM systems. This integration aims to optimize operations and observability by providing modern, secure solutions for telemetry data. Moreover, Tailscale has extended its log streaming capabilities to users of its Free plan, allowing them to stream configuration audit logs to supported partners such as Splunk, Elasticsearch Logstash, Panther, and Cribl, enhancing the product's accessibility and utility before purchase.

Tailscale's October newsletter highlights new product releases, events, and community use cases, showcasing the integration of their services with popular tools and platforms. They introduced a VS Code extension to manage remote files via Tailscale SSH, and announced the beta release of the Tailscale Kubernetes operator, which simplifies exposing services within a Kubernetes network. Improved usability of the Serve and Funnel features has been achieved through user feedback, while auto-updates for Tailscale clients have been introduced in version 1.52 to enhance security and performance. The newsletter also features a homelabber's networking setup using VLANs and community stories, such as a customer's use of Tailscale in a home data acquisition network. Tailscale shared upcoming participation in global events, including KubeCon in Chicago and the Women of Silicon Roundtable in London, and highlighted how companies like Zego have benefited from adopting Tailscale for their remote work infrastructure.