Setting up Kiali in Istio: Visualize your mesh

Introduction

Nowadays, Managing the Microservices that are interacting with each others in real time becomes challenging especially when the clusters are running with hundreds of these microservices. There’s always somethings breaking up or causing performance issues and for looking into these issues you need to go thoroughly with the traffic flow, need to understand where bottlenecks is occurring and which services are failing this becomes very complex. This is where Kiali steps in – Helps you in visualising the Service mesh, monitor traffic flows like requests, latency, and errors in real time. In this blog we will be going thoroughly how to setup Kiali in Istio sevice mesh.

Prerequisites

• Kubernetes cluster with version v1.19 or newer
• Istio installed with version v1.15 or newer
• kubectl access with admin rights
• kubectl and istioctl CLI tools installed and configured
• Basic knowledge of Istio concepts like sidecars, gateways, virtual services, etc

Lets first check if istio is installed on our Kubernetes cluster with below command, it should show the istio components like istiod –

kubectl get pods -n istio-system

Step 1: Install Kiali on Istio 

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/istio/istio/master/samples/addons/kiali.yaml

check status of the deployment by using below command-

kubectl rollout status deployment/kiali -n istio-system

It should show that the “kiali” successfully rolled out as shown below:

Step 2: Verify the Kiali Installation

Let’s, Check if Kiali is up and running in the istio-system namespace, with below command:

kubectl get pods -n istio-system | grep kiali

There should be a pod like below in Running state:

Let’s also check service, with below command:

kubectl get svc -n istio-system | grep kiali

There should be a service like below:

Step 3: Access the Kiali UI

Let’s access the Kiali UI by port forwarding using below command-

kubectl port-forward svc/kiali 20001:20001 -n istio-system

Now, open below URL on your browser:

localhost:20001

Kiali Dashboard

Step 4: Explore the UI of Kiali and it’s features

Kiali gives you a insightful UI in real time for understanding the topology of our service mesh, monitoring traffic flows, and troubleshooting issues.

• Graph View –
  You can see your services, workloads and traffic flow’s in real time.
  

  Graph

• Metrics –
  You can get the performance metrics like request rates, latencies and error rates as shown below.
  
• Health Status –
  You can get a quick health status of Applications like Red = Unhealthy, Green = Healthy. Just hover over the icon to see the details about failed pods, timeouts, or missing sidecars as shown below
  
• Validations
  It shows the misconfiguration like DestinationRules without matching subsets or VirtualServices without a destination.

Step 5: Uninstalling Kiali (optional)

kubectl delete deployment kiali -n istio-system 
kubectl delete service kiali  -n istio-system

Conclusion

Kiali try to simplies the complex topology of the services mesh with realtime visualizations, traffic flows and configuration insight. It plays a crucial role while detecting anomalies in our clusters and as the service mesh grows Kiali will continue to provide these insights.

You can also refer the Official Documentation of Istio Addons – https://istio.io/latest/docs/ops/integrations/

Kiali Official website – https://istio.io/latest/docs/ops/integrations/