Summary

In this chapter, we read about how Istio makes systems observable by generating various telemetry data. Istio provides various metrics that can then be used by Istio operators to fine-tune and optimize a system. This is all achieved by Envoy, which generates various metrics that are then scraped by Prometheus.

Istio allows you to configure new metrics as well as add new dimensions to existing metrics. You learned how to use Prometheus to query various metrics using PromQL and build queries that can provide insight into your system, as well as business operations. We later installed Grafana to visualize the metrics collected by Prometheus, even though there are a number of out-of-the-box dashboards provided for Istio, and you can easily add new dashboards, configure alerts, and create policies on how these alerts should be distributed.

Finally, we installed Jaeger to perform distributed tracing to understand how a request is processed in a distributed system, and we did...