This chapter covers
- Using Grafana for observing metrics visually
- Distributed tracing instrumentation with Jaeger
- Visualizing the network call graph with Kiali
In this chapter, we build on the foundation we established in the previous chapter, and we use some tools to visualize data from the service mesh. We saw how Istio’s data plane and control plane components expose a lot of very useful operational metrics and how we can scrape those into a time-series system like Prometheus. In this chapter we will leverage tools like Grafana and Kiali to visualize those metrics to better understand the behavior of the services in the mesh as well as the mesh itself. We also dig into visualizing the network call graph with distributed tracing tools.
In the previous chapter, we removed the sample Prometheus and Grafana addons that come with a demo installation of Istio. Instead we installed kube-prometheus which is a more realistic set of observability tools.
To double check that you’ve got the kube-prometheus stack installed correctly, check what’s in the prometheus namespace: