Service Mesh - Istio Part 2

In the previous post, we looked at traffic management feature of istio . In this article we will take a brief look at monitoring feature provided by istio. The sidecar injected by istio is responsible for providing this functionality. More details can be found here.

To enable metrics for istio on our workloads, we need to enable metrics endpoint on the workload and use annotations for the pods as shown below.

Once this is done. prometheus will capture the workload metrics as shown below.

Istio provides a metric called "istio_requests_total" which can be used to calculate the SLI, Error rate which can be used to determine the SLO by using prometheus query language for the workloads.

The latency details for all the workloads can be seen in grafana as shown below. Grafana uses the prometheus metrics to populate these dashboards.

We can further navigate to the workload to see additional details.

Next, we will look at the multi-cluster features for the new version of istio.