Quick Start
Run Kiali locally
Kiali can be run directly on your machine without being installed into a Kubernetes cluster. It uses your kubeconfig to connect to your cluster(s). If needed, it can port-forward into the cluster to connect to your external services (prometheus, tracing, istio, grafana).
Running Kiali locally is currently experimental. Functionality may change between releases.
Download the Kiali binary from the Kiali GitHub releases page for your OS and Arch.
Start Kiali which runs the backend server on localhost and opens your default browser to the Kiali UI.
kiali run
To see the full list of options
kiali run --help
If you want to run Kiali locally without a Prometheus instance, use the --disable-prometheus flag:
kiali run --disable-prometheus
This is useful for quickly exploring Kiali’s non-metrics features (workloads, services, Istio configuration, mesh topology) without needing a Prometheus deployment. See Disabling Prometheus for more details.
If the cluster name in your kubeconfig does not match the cluster name in Istio you can override this with --cluster-name-overrides kubeconfig-name=istio-cluster-name. The flag is a comma separated list so you can override as many names as you need.
Install Kiali
You can quickly install Kiali into your cluster via one of the following two methods.
These instructions are not recommended for production environments. Find more detailed information on installing Kiali, see the installation guide.
Before you install Kiali you must have already installed Istio. For full functionality, you should also install a telemetry storage addon (i.e. Prometheus), though Kiali can run without it if you disable Prometheus in the configuration. You might also consider installing Istio’s optional tracing addon (i.e. Jaeger) and optional Grafana addon but those are not required by Kiali. Refer to the Istio documentation for details.
Install via Istio Addons
If you downloaded Istio, the easiest way to install and try Kiali is by running:
kubectl apply -f ${ISTIO_HOME}/samples/addons/kiali.yaml
To uninstall:
kubectl delete -f ${ISTIO_HOME}/samples/addons/kiali.yaml --ignore-not-found
Install via Helm
Only Helm v3 has been tested. Previous Helm versions may or may not work.
To install the latest version of Kiali Server using Helm, run the following command:
helm install \
--namespace istio-system \
--set auth.strategy="anonymous" \
--repo https://kiali.org/helm-charts \
kiali-server \
kiali-server
If you get a validation error, you may have to pass the option --disable-openapi-validation (this is needed on some versions of OpenShift, for example).
To uninstall:
helm uninstall --namespace istio-system kiali-server
Access to the UI
Run the following command:
kubectl port-forward svc/kiali 20001:20001 -n istio-system
Then, access Kiali by visiting https://localhost:20001/ in your preferred web browser.