Troubleshooting errors using access logs
Access logs are produced by the Envoy proxy and can be directed toward the standard output of Envoy. If Istio is installed in demo mode, then access logs are enabled by default and printed to the standard output of the istio-proxy container. Access logs are records of traffic flow to Envoy and can be intertwined together with the access of the Ingress and Egress gateway along with all other upstream and downstream workloads in the mesh, to follow the journey of the request.
By default, access logs are turned off unless you have installed Istio using the demo profile. You can check whether access logs are enabled by inspecting the Istio config map:
% kubectl get cm/istio -n istio-system -o json | jq .data.mesh
"accessLogFile: \"\"\ndefaultConfig:\n discoveryAddress: istiod.istio-system.svc:15012\n proxyMetadata: {}\n tracing:\n zipkin:\n ...
