chapter seven

7 Observability with Istio: understanding the behavior of your services

 

This chapter covers:

  • Basic request-level metric collection
  • Using prometheus to store metrics
  • Adding new metrics in Istio to track in prometheus
  • Creating dashboards for observing metrics visually
  • Distributed tracing instrumentation with Jaeger
  • Visualizing the service mesh with Kiali

7.1 What is observability?

7.1.1 Observability vs Monitoring

7.1.2 How Istio helps with observability

7.2 Exploring Istio metrics

7.2.1 Metrics in the data plane

7.2.2 Metrics in the control plane

7.3 Scraping Istio Metrics with Prometheus

7.3.1 Set up Prometheus and Grafana

7.3.2 Set up Istio’s Grafana Dashboards

7.3.3 Configuring the Prometheus Operator to scrape Istio control plane and workloads

7.4 Customizing Istio’s standard metrics

7.4.1 Configuring existing metrics

7.4.2 Creating new metrics

7.4.3 Grouping calls with new attributes

7.5 Distributed tracing

7.5.1 How does it work

7.5.2 Installing a distributed tracing system

7.5.3 Configuring Istio to perform distributed tracing

7.5.4 Viewing distributed tracing data

7.5.5 Trace sampling, force traces, and custom tags

7.6 Visualization with Kiali

7.7 Summary