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Using Kiali Operator provided by Red Hat

About Kiali

You can use Kiali Operator provided by Red Hat to view configurations, monitor traffic, and analyze traces in a single console. It is based on the open source Kiali project.

Kiali Operator provided by Red Hat is the management console for Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh. It provides dashboards, observability, and robust configuration and validation capabilities. It shows the structure of your service mesh by inferring traffic topology and displays the health of your mesh. Kiali provides detailed metrics, powerful validation, access to Grafana, and strong integration with the Red Hat OpenShift distributed tracing platform (Tempo).

Installing the Kiali Operator provided by Red Hat

The following steps show how to install the Kiali Operator provided by Red Hat.

Do not install the Community version of the Operator. The Community version is not supported.
Prerequisites

  • Access to the Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh web console.

Procedure

  1. Log in to the Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh web console.

  2. Navigate to Operators → OperatorHub.

  3. Type Kiali into the filter box to find the Kiali Operator provided by Red Hat.

  4. Click Kiali Operator provided by Red Hat to display information about the Operator.

  5. Click Install.

  6. On the Operator Installation page, select the stable Update Channel.

  7. Select All namespaces on the cluster (default). This installs the Operator in the default openshift-operators project and makes the Operator available to all projects in the cluster.

  8. Select the Automatic Approval Strategy.

    The Manual approval strategy requires a user with appropriate credentials to approve the Operator installation and subscription process.

  9. Click Install.

  10. The Installed Operators page displays the Kiali Operator’s installation progress.

Configuring OpenShift Monitoring with Kiali

The following steps show how to integrate the Kiali Operator provided by Red Hat with user-workload monitoring.

Prerequisites

  • Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh is installed.

  • User-workload monitoring is enabled. See Enabling monitoring for user-defined projects.

  • OpenShift Monitoring has been configured with Service Mesh. See "Configuring OpenShift Monitoring with Service Mesh".

  • Kiali Operator provided by Red Hat 1.89 is installed.

Procedure

  1. Create a ClusterRoleBinding resource for Kiali:

    Example ClusterRoleBinding configuration
    apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRoleBinding
metadata:
  name: kiali-monitoring-rbac
roleRef:
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
  kind: ClusterRole
  name: cluster-monitoring-view
subjects:
- kind: ServiceAccount
  name: kiali-service-account
  namespace: istio-system

  2. Create a Kiali resource and point it to your Istio instance:

    Example Kiali resource configuration
    apiVersion: kiali.io/v1alpha1
kind: Kiali
metadata:
  name: kiali-user-workload-monitoring
  namespace: istio-system
spec:
  external_services:
    prometheus:
      auth:
        type: bearer
        use_kiali_token: true
      thanos_proxy:
        enabled: true
      url: https://thanos-querier.openshift-monitoring.svc.cluster.local:9091

  3. When the Kiali resource is ready, get the Kiali URL from the Route by running the following command:

    $ echo "https://$(oc get routes -n istio-system kiali -o jsonpath='{.spec.host}')"

  4. Follow the URL to open Kiali in your web browser.

Integrating Red Hat OpenShift distributed tracing platform with Kiali Operator provided by Red Hat

You can integrate Red Hat OpenShift distributed tracing platform with Kiali Operator provided by Red Hat, which enables the following features:

  • Display trace overlays and details on the graph.

  • Display scatterplot charts and in-depth trace/span information on detail pages.

  • Integrated span information in logs and metric charts.

  • Offer links to the external tracing UI.

Configuring Red Hat OpenShift distributed tracing platform with Kiali Operator provided by Red Hat

After Kiali Operator provided by Red Hat is integrated with Red Hat OpenShift distributed tracing platform, you can view distributed traces in the Kiali console. Viewing these traces can provide insight into the communication between services within the service mesh, helping you understand how requests are flowing through your system and where potential issues might be.

Prerequisites

  • You installed Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh.

  • You configured distributed tracing platform with Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh.

Procedure

  1. Update the Kiali resource spec configuration for tracing:

    Example Kiali resource spec configuration for tracing
    spec:
  external_services:
    tracing:
      enabled: true (1)
      provider: tempo
      use_grpc: false
      in_cluster_url: http://tempo-sample-query-frontend.tempo:3200
      url: https://tempo-sample-query-frontend-tempo.apps-crc.testing (2)
    1 Enable tracing.
    2 The OpenShift route for Jaeger UI must be created in the Tempo namespace. You can either manually create it for the tempo-sample-query-frontend service, or update the Tempo custom resource with .spec.template.queryFrontend.jaegerQuery.ingress.type: route.

  2. Save the updated spec in kiali_cr.yaml.

  3. Run the following command to apply the configuration:

    $ oc patch -n istio-system kiali kiali --type merge -p "$(cat kiali_cr.yaml)"
    Example output:
     kiali.kiali.io/kiali patched
Verification

  1. Run the following command to get the Kiali route:

    $ oc get route kiali ns istio-system

  2. Navigate to the Kiali UI.

  3. Navigate to Workload → Traces tab to see traces in the Kiali UI.

Additional resources