Deploying Kiali

Kiali helps you to visualize different aspects of your Istio mesh. For more information, see the Istio 1.6 documentation for using Kiali at https://istio.io/latest/docs/tasks/observability/kiali/.

Create Kiali secret

Create a secret in your Istio namespace with the credentials that you use to authenticate to Kiali.

First, define the credentials you want to use as the Kiali username and passphrase.

Enter a Kiali username when prompted:

KIALI_USERNAME=$(read -p 'Kiali Username: ' uval && echo -n $uval | base64)

Enter a Kiali passphrase when prompted:

KIALI_PASSPHRASE=$(read -sp 'Kiali Passphrase: ' pval && echo -n $pval | base64)

Create the Kiali secret:

cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: kiali
  namespace: istio-system
  labels:
    app: kiali
type: Opaque
data:
  username: $KIALI_USERNAME
  passphrase: $KIALI_PASSPHRASE
EOF

Enable Kiali in Istio

The istioctl binary is available in the Istio installation director, for example:

/home/ubuntu/istio-1.6.4-asm.9/bin

Use the istioctl command to configure Kiali:

istioctl manifest apply --set values.kiali.enabled=true

To verify that the service is running in your cluster, run the following command:

kubectl -n istio-system get svc kiali

NAME    TYPE        CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)     AGE
kiali   ClusterIP   10.96.110.173   <none>        20001/TCP   61s

To access the Kiali interface, you can use port forwarding, or patch the service to create a LoadBalancer:

kubectl -n istio-system patch svc kiali    --type merge --patch '{"spec":{"loadBalancerIP": "10.15.158.99","type":"LoadBalancer"}}'

Check that the service has changed:

kubectl -n istio-system get svc kiali  

NAME    TYPE           CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP    PORT(S)           AGE
kiali   LoadBalancer   10.96.110.173   10.15.158.99   20001:30248/TCP   17m

You can now access the cluster externally at http://10.15.158.99:20001/ or internally at http://10.15.155.124:30248/.

Log in with the username/password combination you specified when creating the Kiali secret.

Figure. Kiali dashboard

Create load

Use the watch command with curl to access the homepage every second.

watch -n 1 curl -o /dev/null -s -w %{http_code} 10.15.158.55/productpage

View the Versioned app graph for the Bookinfo application

Choose Graph in the navigator section on the left hand side of the UI. Then, ensure that bookinfo is selected as the namespace and choose Versioned app graph as the graph type.

Figure. Kiali Versioned app graph

View distribution of requests

You can modify the graph to show the distribution of requests across the three versions of the reviews service.

• Make sure you select Requests percentage in the "Edge Labels" drop down menu to see the percentage of traffic routed to each workload.
• Make sure you select the Service Nodes check box in the "Display" drop down menu to view the service nodes in the graph.

Figure. Kiali requests percentage

The graph shows the requests are distributed equally across the three versions of the reviews service.