Kiali gives teams a visual view of applications running in an Istio service mesh. It combines mesh configuration and available telemetry to show relationships between services and help investigate how traffic is behaving. It is useful when the mesh's moving parts are difficult to understand from individual configuration files. The view depends on the underlying data sources and user permissions, so an empty graph is not by itself proof that services cannot communicate.
Current guidance
It relies on the mesh and its telemetry sources; an empty graph can reflect missing traffic or metrics rather than proof that services are disconnected. Treat the Kiali release, Istio release and observability backends as separate compatibility choices.
The official authentication guide documents several strategies, including Kubernetes tokens, OpenID Connect, OpenShift, a trusted-header proxy and anonymous access. It also qualifies namespace-access control and multi-cluster support by strategy. Choose the mechanism for the actual topology instead of copying an anonymous demonstration configuration into a shared cluster.
Review the service account’s permissions and any configuration-editing capability as part of the access model. Confirm that a user cannot inspect or modify namespaces outside their intended scope, and verify the origin of tokens passed by a reverse proxy. Exercise expired credentials and a telemetry-backend outage so the UI’s failure mode is understood. A chart installation that displays a graph does not establish complete observability, safe authorization or compatibility with every Istio data-plane mode.
Historical upstream link check · 2026-10-09
The recorded upstream address responded successfully (HTTP 200) on 2026-10-09. GitHub does not mark kiali/kiali archived or disabled; this does not establish active maintenance, support or compatibility. Link availability does not certify the historical installation instructions or current security support.
Website availability is separate from project, chart and image support. Use the current guidance and primary sources on this page to assess the distribution.
Historical Kubedex content
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Service Mesh observability.
Kiali provides answers to the question: What are the microservices in my Istio service mesh doing?
A Microservice Architecture breaks up the monolith into many smaller pieces that are composed together. Patterns to secure the communication between services like fault tolerance (via timeout, retry, circuit breaking, etc.) have come up as well as distributed tracing to be able to see where calls are going.
A service mesh can now provide these services on a platform level and frees the application writers from those tasks. Routing decisions are done at the mesh level. Kiali works with Istio to visualise the service mesh topology, features like circuit breakers or request rates.
Kiali also includes Jaeger Tracing to provide distributed tracing out of the box.
Sources & further reading
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