The vanflow collector is a software component that runs inside several skupper containers (including the config-sync container of the skupper-router pods) and is responsible for collecting and exposing information from across the entire network. The collector ingests router connector configuration from all routers on the network and attempts to match the destination of the connector to a "process" (in the context of kubernetes sites a process is a pod) in order to produce metrics and accurate information about remote site configuration. It does this by attempting to match the pod's IP against the configured connector destination. When the connector is not configured with an IP and rather a hostname (as can be the case when exposing a k8s service), the collector attempts to resolve that hostname to an IP in order to find a matching pod. This may make sense when the collector is running in the same site as that router, but is incorrect otherwise.

This may result in errant behavior (such as mistakenly resolving traffic destined for the wrong process in rather unlikely conditions), but was previously believed to be otherwise harmless. This was recently noticed by users closely monitoring their DNS infrastructure.