Install kiali Dashboard & Play With It

Kiali is a graphical dashboard, visualization tool, and user interface for Istio that allows you to view and modify the Istio configuration for your application directly in your web browser, and to visualize the behavior of your application.

1. Prerequisites

• I hope you have set up a Kubernetes cluster in minikube or any cloud platform. If you haven’t set up a K8s cluster yet, I recommend you to read one of my previous blog posts which will guide you to set up a Kubernetes cluster on Google Cloud Provider. If you are using minikube or any other cloud platform, refer to some materials and set up a K8s cluster.
• You have to have Istio installed on your system as well. Refer to my previous blog post to install Istio on your K8s cluster.

2. Install kiali And The Other Addons

• Move to the Istio package directory. Let’s say the downloaded Istio version is istio-1.13.0. (If you are unable to find the Istio version, use ls command in the terminal and then you will see the istio directory.)
  cd istio-1.13.0
• Run the following commands to install the observability and traceability add-ons:
  kubectl apply -f samples/addons
  kubectl rollout status deployment/kiali -n istio-system

Last command will give an output like below.
Waiting for deployment “kiali” rollout to finish: 0 of 1 updated replicas are available…
deployment “kiali” successfully rolled out.

• Access the kiali dashboard.
  istioctl dashboard kiali

You can access kiali dashboard by typing,
http://localhost:20001/kiali
in your web browser!

You have successfully launched kiali dashboard in your web browser. The kiali dashboard looks like below.

Let’s play with this kiali dashboard and get to know more about this!

3. Play With kiali Dashboard

The kiali dashboard looks like above. Your Kubernetes namespaces can be seen in the dashboard. I have deployed a sample application in the mesh-test namespace which can be visible in the dashboard.

We can examine the graph which shows lots of information about the deployed application here. We can examine the traffic distribution, traffic rate, throughput and response time of the application as well.

We will examine the graph of the mesh-test application now. You can visualize App Graph, Service Graph, Versioned App Graph and Workload Graph. You can select the examining traffic as well. For example, you can view http, grpc and tcp traffic. Using the Display option, you can decide what to display. For example, you may need to display traffic distribution, traffic rate, throughput, response time and so on.

For the mesh-test application, I’m viewing a versioned app graph displaying the traffic distribution.

Note that this is a very brief introduction to kiali. We can configure virtual services and destination rules as well in kiali. I hope you get a basic understanding about kiali and its installation process.

Thank you!