A Comprehensive Tutorial on Service Mesh, Istio, Envoy, Access Log, and Log Filtering

Sunrise at Nyainqênkawagarbo (East Face), Yunnan, China.

First things first, I confess: I haven’t used photos that I took as featured images for a while, and I truly miss that.

In this article, we will briefly introduce Envoy, enable Envoy access log in Istio, play with Envoy’s access log filters, and figure out ways to configure Envoy access log filters with Istio.

Some basic knowledge of Istio is expected, but even if you have none, you can follow this tutorial to have a successful local setup.

Without further adieu, let’s get started.

1 A Very Short Introduction to Envoy

Envoy is an L7 high-performance proxy and communication bus developed in C++ and designed for large modern service-oriented architectures.

• It is a self-contained process designed to run alongside every application server.
• At its very core, Envoy is, in fact, an L3/L4 network proxy. A pluggable filter chain mechanism allows filters to be written to perform different TCP/UDP proxy tasks and inserted into the main server.
• Envoy supports an additional HTTP L7 filter layer; HTTP filters can be plugged into the HTTP connection management subsystem that performs different tasks such as…