Kiali Sprint #18 wrap up

We have finished the Sprint #18 and Kiali 0.15.0 has just been released.

For people who are not aware, the Kiali project is developed under an agile cycle. We work in sprints which last 3 weeks. At the end of each sprint, a new version of Kiali is released. Sprint #18 finished on February 22th, 2019; and Sprint #19 will end on March 15th.

It has been a while since our last Sprint update. We have been working hard, and we haven’t took the time to post updates. Just to list a few things:

• Find and filter features were added to the graph
• Support for GRPC traffic was added to the graph
• Basic support to edit some Istio configurations
• Several Istio entities validations have been added
• An Overview page was added
• Ability to see multiple namespaces in the graph
• Istio has included Helm charts to install Kiali. Also, in Istio 1.1 snapshots, Kiali is installed by default when deploying using the demo yaml. Even more, there is a Kiali section in Istio docs!
• Improvements to our website
• …and much more.

I’ll let you find out by yourself the improvements that were added to Kiali in the past. Let’s talk about Sprint #18 work.

Extended highlighting of selected graph element

Previously, when an item was selected in the graph by clicking on it, only the neighborhood of the element was highlighted and all other elements became dimmed. Now, this will be the behavior when hovering over elements and there is no selection. Once you select that element, the backward path to that element will be highlighted and all possible forward paths will also be highlighted.

Runtime icons and dashboard templates

If you are aware that Kiali supports basic monitoring for some runtimes (Thorntail, Vert.x, EAP, SpringBoot, Node.js) you may remember that the runtime was informed textually. The text was replaced by icons. See this Thorntail example:

This feature was first mentioned in our Sprint#14 demo. This is probably one of those so-so hidden Kiali features, because you don’t get it out of the box. You need to add some annotations to your deployments and create some Kiali dashboard CRDs to enable this feature. Documentation for this feature is not yet available, but expect it soon :-)

For now, we are providing some dashboard templates. The last ones we added this sprint are for Node.js and Thorntail. Give a look to the Thorntail one:

New traffic page

In the Workload details page, the Destination services tab was replaced with a Traffic tab. This new page will show both the source and destination of the traffic for a workload, along how much traffic is flowing.

The traffic tab is also be available in the Application details page.

New entities in Istio Config

Istio has an authorization feature. So, support to show Istio’s autorization entities was added to Kiali (RbacConfig, ServiceRole and ServiceRoleBindings):

…and everything else

The mentioned stuff is the most visible. Remember that Kiali is in GitHub and you can check all Kiali back-end and Kiali front-end changes for Sprint#18.

Also, check Kiali’s YouTube channel where we upload a demo of each sprint’s improvements. The video at the left is this sprint’s demo.

If you haven’t used Kiali, give it a try! Check out the Getting started guide available in our website.