Features on Kiali

Appearance

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The standalone Kiali Console lets you customize how the interface looks on your device. These choices are saved in your browser and persist across sessions.

For language settings, see Internationalization.

Opening Preferences

Open the user dropdown in the top-right corner and select Preferences.

In the Preferences modal, adjust color scheme, contrast mode, and theme:

The examples below use the Overview page so you can compare how each option changes the console.

Application Wizards

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Istio Application Wizards

Kiali provides Actions to create, update and delete Istio configuration, driven by wizards.

Actions can be applied to a Service

Actions can also be applied to a Workload

And, actions are available for an entire Namespace

Service Actions

Kiali offers a robust set of service actions, with accompanying wizards.

Traffic Management: Request Routing

The Request Routing Wizard allows creating multiple routing rules.

Detail Views

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Kiali provides filtered list views of all your service mesh definitions. Each view provides health, details, YAML definitions and links to help you visualize your mesh. There are list and detail views for:

Applications
Istio Configuration
Services
Workloads

Selecting an object from the list will bring you to its detail page. For Istio Config, Kiali will present its YAML, along with contextual validation information. Other mesh components present a variety of Tabs.

Health

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

Kiali help users know whether their service mesh is healthy. This includes the health of the mesh infrastructure itself, and the deployed application services.

Service Mesh Infrastructure Health

Users can quickly confirm the health of their infrastructure by looking at the Kiali Masthead. If Kiali detects any health issues with the infrastructure of the mesh, including multi-cluster setups, it will show an indication in the masthead, severity will be reflected via color, and hovering will show the detail:

Internationalization

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

Kiali is used worldwide and some users prefer to display Kiali in a language that they are more comfortable with than English. For this reason Kiali supports internationalization, and it can be localized into multiple languages.

Current supported languages are English, Chinese, Korean, and Spanish.

For color scheme, contrast, and theme settings, see Appearance.

Language preference

In the standalone Kiali Console, open Preferences from the user dropdown as described in Appearance, then choose a value in the Language dropdown.

Istio Ambient Mesh

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

Kiali provides visualization for Ambient Mesh components:

The Kiali Ambient features, as well as Ambient Mesh, are evolving. Some of these features are in alpha status. For enhancements or detected issues, don’t hesitate to open a GitHub issue.

Control Plane Ambient Mesh

When the control plane is in Ambient mode, Kiali will show an Ambient badge on the Namespaces page, for the control plane namespace, in the Type column. It will also be reflected in the control plane side-panel on the Mesh page. This badge indicates that Kiali has detected a ztunnel (the L4 component for Ambient) in the control plane namespace.

Istio Configuration

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

Kiali is more than observability, it also helps you to configure, update and validate your Istio service mesh.

The Istio configuration view provides advanced filtering and navigation for Istio configuration objects, such as Virtual Services and Gateways. Kiali provides inline config editing and powerful semantic validation for Istio resources.

Validations

Kiali performs a set of validations on your Istio Objects, such as Destination Rules, Service Entries, and Virtual Services. Kiali’s validations go above and beyond what Istio offers. Where Istio offers mainly static checks for well-formed definitions, Kiali performs semantic validations to ensure that the definitions make sense, across objects, and in some cases even across namespaces. Kiali validations are based on the runtime status of your service mesh.

Istio Infrastructure Status

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A service mesh simplifies application services by deferring the non-business logic to the mesh. But for healthy applications the service mesh infrastructure must also be running normally. Kiali monitors the multiple components that make up the service mesh, letting you know if there is an underlying problem.

A component status will be one of: Not found, Not ready, Unreachable, Not healthy and Healthy. Not found means that Kiali is not able to find the deployment. Not ready means no pods are running. Unreachable means that Kiali hasn’t been successfully able to communicate with the component (Prometheus, Grafana and Jaeger). Not healthy means that the deployment doesn’t have the desired amount of replicas running. Otherwise, the component is Healthy and it won’t be shown in the list.

Multi-cluster

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A basic Istio mesh deployment has a single control plane with a single data plane, deployed on a single Kubernetes cluster. But Istio supports a variety of advanced deployment models. It allows a mesh to span multiple primary (control plane) and/or remote (data plane only) clusters, and can use a single or multi-network approach. The only strict rule is that within a mesh service names are unique. A non-basic mesh deployment generally involves multiple clusters. See installation instructions for more detail on installing advanced mesh deployments.

Multi-mesh

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Running multiple meshes within a single cluster is an important use case for multi-tenancy, isolation of environments (e.g. production vs. staging), or supporting different teams with independent control planes. Istio supports deploying multiple independent control planes on the same cluster using revisions and unique mesh IDs. Kiali can visualize and monitor these multi-mesh deployments.

Long-Lived Meshes vs. Revision-Based Upgrades

It is important to distinguish between two scenarios where multiple control planes coexist on a single cluster:

Security

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Kiali gives support to better understand how mTLS is used in Istio meshes. Find those helpers in the Mesh page, Traffic Graph, Overview Page, and specific validations.

Mesh indicator

At the right panel of the Istio Control Plane from the Mesh page, Kiali shows a lock when the mesh has enabled mTLS for the whole service mesh. It means that all the communications in the mesh uses mTLS.

Topology

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Kiali offers multiple ways for users to examine their mesh Topology. Each combines several information types to help users quickly evaluate the health of their service architecture.

Overview

Kiali’s default landing page is the mesh Overview. It presents a high-level view of the mesh clusters, control planes, data planes, and configuration, for the user. It combines service and application information, along with telemetry, validations and health, to provide a holistic summary of the system behavior. It highlights potential issues that the user may need to investigate.

Tracing

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

Kiali offers a native integration with two different Distributed Tracing platforms, Jaeger and Grafana Tempo. As such, users can access trace visualizations. But more than that, Kiali incorporates tracing into several correlated views, making your investment in trace data even more valuable.

For a quick glimpse at Kiali tracing features, see below. For a detailed explanation of tracing in Kiali, see this 3-part Trace my mesh blog series. There is a detailed guide to configure access to the different distributed tracing platform, Jaeger and Grafana Tempo.

Validation

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