kiali

Kiali is a management console for Istio, a service mesh technology used with Kubernetes. A service mesh is a layer that manages how the individual services in a distributed application talk to each other, handling things like traffic routing, security between services, and observability. Kiali gives you a visual interface for understanding and controlling what is happening inside that mesh.

The main thing Kiali provides is visibility. It shows you a live map of how your services are connected, what traffic is flowing between them, and whether any connections are failing. You can see metrics, distributed traces (which follow a request as it passes through multiple services), and logs all in one place. This makes it much easier to diagnose problems in a system with many services, since you can see at a glance which service is slow or generating errors.

Kiali also lets you configure Istio without writing YAML files directly. You can set traffic routing rules, enable security policies between services, and manage other mesh configuration through the UI. It validates your Istio configuration and warns you about settings that might cause problems.

Installing Kiali requires a running Kubernetes cluster with Istio already installed. Kiali can be added as an Istio add-on for quick evaluation, or installed as a standalone component for production use. The project provides Helm charts for deployment. Building from source requires Go, Node.js, Docker, and the GNU make tool.

Kiali is primarily used by platform engineers and backend teams who operate Kubernetes clusters and need to understand what is happening inside a service mesh without reading raw logs and metrics.