concept Kiali in category istio

This is an excerpt from Manning's book Istio in Action MEAP V09. Login to get full access to this book.

7.5  Visualization with Kiali

Istio comes with a powerful visualization dashboard from an open-source project named Kiali that can assist understanding the service mesh at runtime. Kiali pulls a lot of the metrics from Prometheus and the underlying platform (like Kubernetes) and establishes a runtime graph of the components in the mesh to give you a visual overview of what services are communicating with others. You can also interact with the graph and dig into areas that could be problems to learn more about what’s happening. Kiali is different from Grafana in that it focuses on building a directed graph of how the servcies interact with each other with live-updating metrics. Grafana is great at dashboards with guages, counters, charts, and more, but does not present an interactive drawing or "map" of the services in the cluster. In this section, we’ll look at the capabilities of the Kiali dashboard.

Before we get started, we will want to configure Kiali with a username and password so we can log in to the user interface. If you installed Istio with the Helm charts, you may have been prompted to create the username and password already. If so, and you remember your Kiali username and password, skip this section. If not, let’s start by creating the username in a Kubernetes secret named kiali. The username and password will be base64 encrypted with the following commands:

Figure 7.18. Overview dashboard of the service mesh using Kiali