Persistent dashboard

How can I get a dashboard such as kiali to run without needing to manually start the process with istioctl dashboard kiali and having it run inside the terminal?

I know I can do istioctl dashboard kiali &, but I don’t want it running in the background of a terminal either.

The way that works (with istioctl as you described) is more for demo/dev purposes. If you want production deployment then you will probably want to install Kiali using the Kiali Operator - it can install an ingress (or route if you are on OpenShift) so you don’t need to run that istioctl dashboard command everytime you want to see the kiali UI.

See: https://kiali.io/documentation/getting-started/ for details