Exploring Kiali Dashboards
Explore how to access and use Kiali dashboards to visualize network traffic within Kubernetes service meshes. Understand the process of creating authentication Secrets, logging in, and interpreting the traffic flow between applications. Discover how Kiali complements Grafana for monitoring and prepares you for chaos engineering experiments by helping detect patterns and creating alerts.
We’re about to explore Kiali as an alternative, or a complement, to Grafana dashboards. Before we do that, please cancel the tunnel to Grafana by pressing ctrl+c
Like with Grafana, we won’t go into detail; we’ll only take a quick look at Kiali. I will assume that you’ll explore it in more detail later on. After all, it’s just a UI.
Unlike Grafana, which is a general dashboarding solution that works with many different sources of metrics, Kiali is specific to service meshes. It visualizes network traffic.
Opening up the Kiali dashboard
Let’s open it and see what we’ll get.
Just like with Grafana, we created a tunnel to Kiali, and you should see it in your browser.
We’re presented with a screen that expects us to enter a username and password. Unlike Grafana that comes without authentication by default, Kiali requires us to log in. However, we cannot do that just yet because we did not create a username and password. Kiali expects to find authentication info in a Kubernetes Secret, so we need ...