Grafana

Grafana configuration

Istio provides preconfigured Grafana dashboards for the most relevant metrics of the mesh. Although Kiali offers similar views in its metrics dashboards, it is not in Kiali’s goals to provide the advanced querying options, nor the highly customizable settings, that are available in Grafana. Thus, it is recommended that you use Grafana if you need those advanced options.

Kiali can provide a direct link from its metric dashboards to the equivalent or most similar Grafana dashboard, which is convenient if you need the powerful Grafana options. For these links to appear in Kiali you need to manually configure the Grafana URL, like in the following example:

spec:
  external_services:
    grafana:
      enabled: true
      # Grafana service name is "grafana" and is in the "telemetry" namespace.
      in_cluster_url: 'http://grafana.telemetry:3000/'
      # Public facing URL of Grafana
      url: 'http://my-ingress-host/grafana'