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kiali/kiali

★ 3,611GoAudience · ops devopsComplexity · 5/5LicenseSetup · hard

TLDR

Kiali is a visual management console for Istio service meshes on Kubernetes. It shows a live service map, traffic metrics, and configuration tools so you can see and fix problems across many services at once.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((repo))
    What it does
      Service mesh UI
      Live traffic map
      Istio config editor
      Health monitoring
    Tech stack
      Go
      NodeJS React
      Kubernetes Istio
      Helm
    Use cases
      Debug service latency
      Visualize traffic flow
      Manage Istio config
    Audience
      Platform engineers
      DevOps teams
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Code map

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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Visualize which services are talking to each other and where traffic failures are occurring

USE CASE 2

Diagnose slow requests across multiple Kubernetes services using distributed traces in one UI

USE CASE 3

Edit Istio traffic routing rules and security policies through a browser instead of writing YAML

Tech stack

GoNode.jsReactKubernetesIstioHelm

Getting it running

Difficulty · hard Time to first run · 1day+

Requires a running Kubernetes cluster with Istio installed, not suitable for local testing without significant infra setup.

In plain English

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.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
How do I install Kiali on a Kubernetes cluster that already has Istio and use it to see my service map?
Prompt 2
My Kubernetes service is slow and I need to find which microservice is the bottleneck. How do I use Kiali to trace the request?
Prompt 3
How do I use Kiali to set a traffic routing rule that sends 10% of requests to a canary version of a service?
Prompt 4
What does the Kiali service graph show and how do I read the health indicators for each service node?
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