Kiali 101: Understanding and Utilizing this Essential Istio Service Mesh Management Tool

Alex Vazquez
5 min readJan 2, 2023

What Is Kiali?

Kiali is an open-source project that provides observability for your Istio service mesh. Developed by Red Hat, Kiali helps users understand the structure and behavior of their mesh and any issues that may arise.

Kiali provides a graphical representation of your mesh, showing the relationships between the various service mesh components, such as services, virtual services, destination rules, and more. It also displays vital metrics, such as request and error rates, to help you monitor the health of your mesh and identify potential issues.

What are Kiali Main Capabilities?

One of the critical features of Kiali is its ability to visualize service-to-service communication within a mesh. This lets users quickly see how services are connected, and requests are routed through the mesh. This is…

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Alex Vazquez

PSG Senior Architect at TIBCO Software with a focus on Cloud Development, Event Processing and Enterprise Integration