Kiali: Service mesh observability and configuration

In this section:

Multiple Istio control planes in the same cluster
Installing a Kiali Server of a different version than the Operator
Using a custom image registry
Development Install

Multiple Istio control planes in the same cluster

Currently, Kiali can manage only one Istio control plane. However, there are certain cases where you may have more than one Istio control plane in your cluster. One of such cases is when performing a Canary upgrade of Istio.

In these cases, you will need to configure in Kiali which control plane you want to manage. This is done by configuring the name of the components of the control plane. This is configured in the Kiali CR and the default values are the following:

spec:
  external_services:
    istio:
      config_map_name: "istio"
      istiod_deployment_name: "istiod"
      istio_sidecar_injector_config_map_name: "istio-sidecar-injector"

If you want to manage both Istio control planes, simply install two Kiali instances and point each one to a different Istio control plane.

Installing a Kiali Server of a different version than the Operator

When you install the Kiali Operator, it will be configured to install a Kiali Server that is the same version as the operator itself. For example, if you have Kiali Operator v1.34.0 installed, that operator will install Kiali Server v1.34.0. If you upgrade (or downgrade) the Kiali Operator, the operator will in turn upgrade (or downgrade) the Kiali Server.

There are certain use-cases in which you want the Kiali Operator to install a Kiali Server whose version is different than the operator version. Read the following section Using a custom image registry section to learn how to configure this setup.

Using a custom image registry

Kiali is released and published to the Quay.io container image registry. There is a repository hosting the Kiali operator images and another one for the Kiali server images.

If you need to mirror the Kiali container images to some other registry, you still can use Helm to install the Kiali operator as follows:

$ helm install \
    --namespace kiali-operator \
    --create-namespace \
    --set image.repo=your.custom.registry/owner/kiali-operator-repo
    --set image.tag=your_custom_tag
    --set allowAdHocKialiImage=true
    kiali-operator \
    kiali/kiali-operator

Notice the --set allowAdHocKialiImage=true which allows specifying a custom image in the Kiali CR. For security reasons, this is disabled by default.

Then, when creating the Kiali CR, use the following attributes:

spec:
  deployment:
    image_name: your.custom.registry/owner/kiali-server-repo
    image_version: your_custom_tag

Development Install

This option installs the latest Kiali Operator and Kiali Server images which are built from the master branches of Kiali GitHub repositories. This option is good for demo and development installations.

helm install \
  --set cr.create=true \
  --set cr.namespace=istio-system \
  --set cr.spec.deployment.image_version=latest \
  --set image.tag=latest \
  --namespace kiali-operator \
  -- create-namespace \
  kiali-operator \
  kiali/kiali-operator