Kiali Mid-Sprint Bonus — Graph Find

We’re in the middle of sprint 16 for the Kiali project and it’s going well. Kiali is a project for observing your Istio service mesh on Kubernetes or OpenShift. We continue to try and provide the best graph visualization possible. In the last several sprints we have added great stuff like detailed node graphs (drill down with double-click), service-entry nodes, and multi-namespace support. But today I want to let you know about the new Graph Find feature, just merged into master a few days ago. Graph Find is a powerful new way to locate and highlight items of interest in the graph. You’ll see a new text box that let’s you type in a variety of simple criteria. It looks like this, and if you click the help icon you’ll get a bunch of help on how to use it:

I’ll just run through a few examples. Sometimes, when you have a larger mesh displayed it’s hard to locate a specific node because of the zoom level. In the example below I want locate nodes related to my productpage service. I enter, “name = productpage”:

I can quickly see the four highlighted nodes and zoom in as needed. Note that there are lot of operators available: contains, startswith, not, etc. There are also a bunch of operands. Graph Find also supports AND and OR. In the following example I want to find my virtual services in the bookinfo namespace. I could type in “namespace = bookinfo AND has virtualservice”. But I’m going to shorten things a bit to demonstrate that as you learn the query language it can be a bit less verbose. I’ll type in “ns *= book and vs”:

I can see that there is one highlighted virtual service node.

I can can also find edges of interest. For example, let’s identify edges with a response time > 50ms. I enable response time edge labels and then type in “responseTime > 50”:

Note that the Find re-evaluates each time the graph updates, so if I sit back and watch with auto-refresh, the highlighted edges can change on each update.

The new Graph Find feature helps you quickly identify items of interest in the graph. Let us know what you think.

I didn’t show it explicitly, but if you look closely at the screenshots above (see the top left selector, and also the summary panel to the right) you’ll notice the multi-namespace feature; I had three specific namespaces included in my graph. That’s just one of many recent additions in Kiali. If you are using Istio you should also be using Kiali for observation. And of course, Kiali is always looking for feedback and contributors! For help getting started visit the Kiali homepage or Kiali on Github.