FAQ on Kiali

AI

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

What is Kiali Chatbot and what is its status?

Kiali Chatbot is Kiali’s built-in AI assistant in the Kiali UI. It helps users ask questions about their service mesh and get responses grounded in live Kiali data (for example, graph, metrics, traces, logs, and resource details).

The chatbot was first released in Kiali 2.22 and is currently in Dev preview. See Kiali Chatbot for details.

Does Kiali Chatbot require an external MCP server?

No. Kiali Chatbot does not require an external MCP server. It uses internal MCP-style tools implemented in Kiali itself.

Ambient

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

Why can’t I see the traffic graph when not using a Waypoint?

There can be multiple reasons, but here are some troubleshooting steps:

Is the application correctly enrolled in Ambient? Make sure you see the Ambient label in the control plane card in Kiali, or make sure the namespace is labeled with istio.io/dataplane-mode=ambient.

This means that the traffic graph will have L4 metrics if there is traffic. You want to make sure the traffic selectors select ZTunnel as well as the type of traffic (e.g. Tcp) that is flowing:

Authentication

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

How to obtain a token when logging in via token auth strategy

When configuring Kiali to use the token auth strategy, it requires users to log into Kiali as a specific user via the user’s service account token. Thus, in order to log into Kiali you must provide a valid Kubernetes token.

Note that the following examples assume you installed Kiali in the istio-system namespace.

For Kubernetes prior to v1.24

Distributed Tracing

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

How to know which is the URL for Jaeger or Tempo?

From Kiali 2.11, a new tracing tool in the Mesh page is provided to help troubleshooting and provide possible valid tracing configurations.

Why is Jaeger unreachable or Kiali showing the error “Could not fetch traces”?

Istio components status indicator shows “Jaeger unreachable”:

While on any Tracing page, error “Could not fetch traces” is displayed:

General

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

How do I determine what version I am running?

There are several components within the Istio/Kiali infrastructure that have version information.

To see the Kiali version for the instance running your UI: Go to the Help dropdown menu found at the top-right of the Kiali Console window and select “About”. This will pop up the About dialog box which displays detailed information for the current Kiali instance. From here you can also link to the Mesh page.

Help dropdown menu:

Graph

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

Why is my graph empty?

There are several reasons why a graph may be empty. First, make sure you have selected at least one namespace. Kiali will look for traffic into, out of, and within the selected namespaces. Another reason is that Istio is not actually generating the expected telemetry. This is typically an indication that workload pods have not been injected with the Istio sidecar proxy (Envoy proxy). But it can also mean that there is an issue with Prometheus configuration, and it is not scraping metrics as expected. To verify that telemetry is being reported to Prometheus, see this FAQ entry.

Installation

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

What is the difference between the operator and the server helm chart?

There are two installation mechanisms from which you can choose when installing the Kiali Server. The first is the recommended installation mechanism - the Kiali Operator. The second installation mechanism is the server helm chart. There are some features that you get with the Kiali Operator that you do not get with the server helm chart. The main differences between the two are mentioned below, though this list may be incomplete.

Istio Component Status

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

How can I add one component to the list?

If you are interested in adding one more component to the Istio Component Status tooltip, you have the option to add one new component into the Kiali CR, under the spec.external_services.istio.component_status field.

For each component there, you will need to specify the app label of the deployment’s pods, the namespace and whether is a core component or add-on.

One component is ‘Not found’ but I can see it running. What can I do?

The first thing you should do is check the Kiali CR for the spec.external_services.istio.component_status field (see the reference documentation here)

OSSMC

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

What OSSMC features work without Kiali installed?

When the OpenShift Service Mesh Console (OSSMC) plugin is installed but no Kiali server is connected to the plugin, the Service Mesh menu still provides Istios and Kialis pages. Those pages list every Istio and Kiali custom resource on the cluster so you can navigate multiple mesh instances from the OpenShift Console. They do not require a Kiali server.

Pages that require a connected Kiali server (Overview, Traffic Graph, Mesh, Namespaces, Applications, Services, Workloads, Istio Config) and Service Mesh tabs on OpenShift resource detail pages need a connected and reachable Kiali instance.

Performance and Scalability

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

What are some Tips for working with a large mesh?

It can be an observability challenge to work with a large mesh. Here are a few things that can be done to improve the situation.

Resources and Connectivity

Before talking about Kiali features, it is important to understand that Kiali’s performance is dependent on the performance and responsiveness of your metrics database (typically Prometheus), and your tracing store, for installations using tracing. For Prometheus scalability tips, see Tuning. See Tempo Tuning if using Tempo for your trace store.

Validations

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

Which formats does Kiali support for specifying hosts?

Istio highly recommends that you always use fully qualified domain names (FQDN) for hosts in DestinationRules. However, Istio does allow you to use other formats like short names (details or details.bookinfo). Kiali only supports FQDN and simple service names as host formats: for example details.bookinfo.svc.cluster.local or details. Validations using the details.bookinfo format might not be accurate.

In the following example it should show the validation of “More than one Destination Rule for the same host subset combination”. Because of the usage of the short name reviews.bookinfo Kiali won’t show the warning message on both destination rules.