Kiali Sprint #19 — dashboards, new login mechanism, wizard and more

Update: There was an issue in v0.16.0 that was preventing Kiali to work correctly in some clusters, so patch version 0.16.1 was released. Please, use this version.

Kiali 0.16 is out and this marks the end of Sprint #19. This sprint’s work was mostly fixes and improvements of existing features. Yet, there is some new visible stuff.

If you prefer to watch, here is the video demoing Sprint #19 work:

If you are going to upgrade Kiali from previous versions to v0.16, be aware that you will need to re-deploy because there were important changes in the deploy YAML files. It won’t be enough to just pull the new DockerHub image.

Runtimes monitoring update

Runtime dashboards are now installed by default when using the install script. New Quarkus and Spring Boot (shown below) dashboards were added this sprint.

Read the new Runtimes monitoring section in our website documenting this feature — written by Joel Takvorian. Please, provide feedback if you think something is missing or is not very clear. Also, check out Heiko’s blog post discussing this feature.

Joel also prepared a variant of Istio’s bookinfo sample app that uses this feature. Get the sample app in: https://github.com/jotak/bookinfo-runtimes

Kiali itself is now taking advantage of this feature and you will see new metric tabs if you check Kiali in the Applications and Workload pages.

Login with your cluster credentials

If you are installing Kiali on an OKD cluster or a variant like OpenShift, you can use your cluster credentials to login into Kiali. If you want to enable this feature, you need to install Kiali using these commands:

export AUTH_STRATEGY="openshift"
bash <(curl -L http://git.io/getLatestKiali)

You will also need to bind the Kiali ClusterRole to the account of the user because its privileges will be used. This brings the possibility to assign different permissions to each user by creating customized ClusterRoles.

This feature required a large effort. If you try it, please, report any issue that you find.

Note: You cannot mix login mechanisms. You need to choose between regular login, logging in with your cluster credentials, or anonymous usage. See the environment variables section of the README.md repository file for more info.

Graph page improvements

If you want to see a bigger graph, side panel is now collapsible:

In the GIF, you may also realize that the toolbar is improved to be friendly across more screen resolutions and to explicitly show some of your selections. If you want to compare, this was how it looked previously:

Read-only role

Since Kiali has been getting features to create, update and delete some configurations, a new ClusterRole named kiali-viewer is provided. If you don’t want let users to make changes to the mesh through Kiali, use this role in Kiali’s ServiceAccount (or the user account if Kiali is configured for login using cluster credentials).

New Matching routing wizard

There is a new wizard that allows to configure traffic routing by matching properties of the requests.

This wizards creates an Istio’s VirtualService with the HTTPMatchRequest component to configure the routing.

Improved Jaeger integration

For a better user experience toolbars are improved, the global namespace dropdown works like in other Kiali pages, there is better bookmarking support, and more. Try it!

Mutual TLS detection

In the previous Sprint, detection of mesh-wide mutual TLS was added and Kiali started displaying a lock icon in the main header. This is now complemented with namespace-wide mTLS detection. Read the main description of front-end PR#1060 for more screenshots.

…and all other changes

Since some previous releases, Kiali has been including validations for Istio objects. This sprint some validations have been added and fixed. Check the updated documentation about validations of Istio objects in our website.

Additionally, remember that Kiali is on GitHub and you can see the list of all Kiali back-end and Kiali front-end changes for Sprint #19.

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