Chatbot on Kiali

Chatbot

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Kiali Chatbot is Kiali’s built-in AI assistant in the Kiali UI. It lets you ask questions about your service mesh and get answers backed by live data from Kiali and its configured backends (Prometheus, tracing, Kubernetes, etc.).

It does not require an external MCP server. Kiali includes its own set of MCP-style tools internally, so the AI can call them without depending on a separate MCP deployment.

Status

The Kiali chatbot was first released in Kiali version 2.22 and it is in Dev preview.

Token prices

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Kiali can estimate the monetary cost of ChatAI usage from a per-model token price catalog. Those estimates appear on the AI consumption dashboard and can be used with optional per-user budgets.

To use consumption tracking, token prices, and the AI consumption dashboard, ai.metrics must be enabled (ai.metrics: true). If metrics are disabled, Kiali does not record token usage, does not estimate cost, and does not show consumption data.

Cost estimates, dashboard access, and the price catalog are configured under ai.consumption. For the configuration keys, see ai.metrics and ai.consumption in the Kiali CR spec.

Budgets

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

You can cap ChatAI usage per user with ai.consumption.budgets. Each budget sets a reset interval, optional cost and token limits, and optional provider/model allowlists. Cost limits use the same catalog described in Token prices.

To use consumption tracking, token prices, and budgets, ai.metrics must be enabled (ai.metrics: true). If metrics are disabled, budgets are not enforced and remaining-budget data is not shown.

If budgets is empty (the default), there are no budget restrictions.

Tools (schemas)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Kiali Chatbot uses internal MCP-style tools (implemented inside Kiali) to fetch live data and perform safe actions. These are not external MCP server tools.

Administrators can control which of these tools are exposed to the AI by using ai.chat.tools for global filtering and ai.chat.providers[].tools for provider-specific filtering. Use the exact tool names below in enabled_tools and disabled_tools.

The tool input schemas are defined in Kiali under kiali/ai/mcp/tools/*.yaml. The tool outputs are JSON structures returned by the Kiali backend and consumed by the model and/or UI.