Interview › Istio & Service Mesh
How does Istio integrate with Grafana and Kiali, and what does Kiali show?
Istio & Service Mesh · Intermediate level
Answer
Grafana visualizes Istio metrics, while Kiali shows the mesh topology and service graph, including traffic edges, health, request rates, response codes, mTLS status, and Istio configuration relationships. Together they help operators move from metrics to topology-aware diagnosis.
Technical explanation
Grafana is good for time-series dashboards, SLOs, and historical trends.
Kiali is useful for understanding which services call each other and whether traffic is flowing as expected through the mesh.
Kiali can also highlight misconfigurations or missing links between VirtualService, DestinationRule, Gateway, and workloads.
Hands-on example
Troubleshooting example:
1. Grafana shows checkout 5xx rate increased.
2. Kiali shows the failing edge is checkout -> payments, not checkout -> inventory.
3. Inspect Istio config for that edge.
4. Use proxy-config clusters/endpoints for checkout to confirm payments endpoints and outlier status.
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- What is the difference between the Istio control plane and data plane?
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