Tracing in Kiali, correlation with Metrics

Since early 2020, Kiali is improving its story around Tracing. In the past, it supported some limited integration with Jaeger essentially via an iframe embedded in the UI. It was also performing some queries directly to Jaeger, for instance, to get the number of traces in error for a given service.

It has all been rewritten in Kiali 1.12 and 1.13. There were two main axis of improvements:

• Kiali now has its own UI for Tracing. It still depends on Jaeger to fetch traces, though. We didn’t do that only to discard an old and troublesome iframe. More importantly, it’s to provide a more consistent user experience in Kiali: better navigation with links to Service details, metrics and logs from a trace, and a better visual integration too. It also opens the door for future enhancements. It is meant to complement Jaeger UI, which is still accessible via external links by the way. Check out our documentation about this new screen.

New Traces page in Kiali

• In Kiali metrics pages, there is now the option to display tracing spans as part of the metrics charts. Hence it enables some visual correlation between traces and metrics. You can find out more on Metrics and Traces correlation in this blog post.

Metrics/spans correlation: here JVM memory/threads increase correlated with tracing spans spike

Have fun with tracing, and as always your feedback is welcome!