Deploying add-on components to provide observability

By now, you know how to deploy Istio and understand some of the most used objects, but you haven't seen one of the most useful features yet – observability. At the beginning of the chapter, we mentioned that observability was one of our favorite features provided by Istio, and in this chapter, we will explain how to deploy a popular Istio add-on called Kiali.

Installing Prometheus

Before we install Kiali, we need to deploy an open-source monitoring and alert component called Prometheus that was developed by SoundCloud to store our mesh metrics. Prometheus was developed in 2012 and in 2016 it was added to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), becoming only the second project in the CNCF behind Kubernetes.

People who are newer to Prometheus and Kubernetes often misunderstand the features provided by Prometheus. Prometheus does not provide logging for your containers or infrastructure, that's where...