Monitor & Visualize

Install Grafana and Prometheus

Istio provides a basic sample installation to quickly get Prometheus and Grafana up and running, bundled with all of the Istio dashboards already installed:

export ISTIO_RELEASE=$(echo $ISTIO_VERSION |cut -d. -f1,2)

# Install Prometheus
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/istio/istio/release-${ISTIO_RELEASE}/samples/addons/prometheus.yaml

# Install Grafana
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/istio/istio/release-${ISTIO_RELEASE}/samples/addons/grafana.yaml

We can now verify that they have been installed:

kubectl -n istio-system get deploy grafana prometheus


NAME         READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
grafana      1/1     1            1           63s
prometheus   1/1     1            1           64s

Collecting new telemetry data

Open a new terminal tab and setup port-forwarding for Grafana by executing the following command

kubectl -n istio-system port-forward $(kubectl -n istio-system get pod -l app=grafana -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}') 8080:3000

Open the Istio Dashboard via the Grafana UI

  • In your Cloud9 environment, click Preview / Preview Running Application

Open Grafana

  • Scroll to the end of the URL and append:
dashboard/db/istio-mesh-dashboard
  • Click the ‘Pop Out Into New Window’ button

Grafana FullScreen

Open a new terminal tab and use these commands to send a traffic to the mesh

export GATEWAY_URL=$(kubectl -n istio-system get service istio-ingressgateway -o jsonpath='{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].hostname}')

watch --interval 1 curl -s -I -XGET "http://${GATEWAY_URL}/productpage"

You will see that the traffic is evenly spread between reviews:v1 and reviews:v3

Grafana Dashboard

We encourage you to explore other Istio dashboards that are available by clicking the Istio Mesh Dashboard menu on top left of the page, and selecting a different dashboard.