Kiali releases 1.53 to 1.57: Features update

Hello community. Almost three months have passed since my last post. During this time the Kiali project has released five more versions.

As usual, all live presentations are recorded and posted on Kiali channel:

Kiali v1.53 updates — about 36 mins long

Kiali v1.54 updates — about 15 mins long

Kiali v1.55 updates — about 12 mins long

Kiali v1.56 updates — about 14 mins long

Kiali v1.57 updates — about 22 mins long

And here we have listed the highlighted improvements in Kiali for recent releases:

Control Plane card redesign on the Overview Page

The Control Plane card in the Overview page is redesigned to show more information, and is now always on top of the page. It has a size of 3 cards.

Here are several important sections added into the card:

• CPU and Memory with thresholds (obtained from istiod’s discovery container).
• Proxy Push Time: The delay in seconds proxy receives information about Istio config change. There is a nice demo of this feature in the v1.57 live demo (link is above).

mTLS indication improvements on Overview Page

When showing the mTLS lock icon on namespaces and when mTLS is enabled Mesh-wide, it will now show a message in the lock’s tooltip that the namespace’s mTLS status is extended from Mesh-wide.

Management of traffic routing in the graph

A new feature is added on the Service node of Graph page to right click and use the Traffic Wizard feature action on that particular Service, like it is in Service details page Actions dropdown. This allows you to add routing rules without ever leaving the graph page.

Ability to show both reporters in Metrics

A new option “Both” is added in the “Reported from” dropdown of Metrics tabs, which will show combination of “Source” and “Destination” traffic on each metric graph. And a tooltip on the chart will show more information about both types. Among other things, this feature can help to show network latency and circuit breakers.

Improve mTLS traffic observability

Mutual TLS traffic can be shown now on Inbound/Outbound Metrics tabs of Applications, Workloads and Services pages. By checking the “Connection Security Policy” option in Metrics Settings both mTLS and non-mTLS traffic will be shown.

Improvements in the Workload Logs

The Workload pod logs loading performance is improved to be able to handle a large amount of log lines. The “tail lines” drop-down was replaced with a “max lines” drop-down, which shows lines from the beginning of the log. Also, all log lines can be loaded.

Another feature added here is sorting logs with milliseconds precision.

Improved Kiali validations on the side panel

A new section is added into the Istio config Overview page called “Configuration Analysis”, which shows the validation results as Error or Warning codes, each offering a Tooltip with validation information. This section helps users to have all validation messages in one place.

Envoy tab: tooltips and helpers

There are added more tooltips to better explain Envoy terminology and to help users troubleshooting any scenario they can see.

Gateway API Support

Initial support for Kubernetes Gateway API. Gateway and HTTPRoute objects are shown in Istio Config list page and can be edited.

Support for new Istio Configurations

Added support for new Istio configuration objects, which are Telemetry and Wasm Plugins. They can be listed, filtered and edited.

Wrap up

These are the main features I wanted to highlight in this post. Feel free to share your thoughts about what type of information you want to see in future posts. And, as always, we appreciate any ideas and feedback about Kiali features.

Remember that Kiali is OpenSource and you can contribute to build a better project! It would be nice if you also contribute with written content in Kiali’s Medium publication!