Manages connections to Ziti controllers. Handles controller discovery, connection establishment, failover, and maintains heartbeats. Routes control plane messages between the router and controllers.

Link Registry

Maintains the registry of active links to other routers in the mesh. Tracks link states, manages link lifecycle, and provides link lookup capabilities for routing decisions.

Forwarder

The packet forwarding engine that routes data between xgress instances. Delivers payloads to links, xgress instances or edge forwarders.

Faulter

Monitors link health and detects failures. Automatically reports link faults to controllers and triggers link recovery processes when connectivity issues are detected.

Scanner

Continuously scans the forwarder's state to detect and clean up stale forwarding entries. Removes inactive circuits and performs periodic maintenance of the forwarding tables.

Data Plane Components

Xgress Components

Handle ingress and egress traffic for the router:

Xgress Listeners: Accept incoming connections from clients and services
Xgress Dialers: Establish outbound connections to services
Xgress Factories: Create protocol-specific xgress instances (edge, transport, proxy, tunnel)
Xgress Registry: Global registry managing all xgress factory types

Xgress Types

edge: Handles Ziti SDK connections
transport: Router-to-router communication
proxy: TCP/UDP proxy connections
tunnel: Intercepted traffic from tunneling clients

Metrics

Comprehensive metrics collection covering:

Link latency and throughput
Xgress connection statistics
Pool utilization (link dialer, egress dialer, rate limiter)

All metrics are reported to controllers and available via health check APIs.