Poll - should we make Envoy dashboards in Kiali more visible?

User Experience
1

Hello,

Kiali developers here, we would like to get some feedback on a probably little known Kiali feature: its ability to show Envoy metrics. Basically, in addition to all the metrics provided by Istio, Envoy itself exposes a lot of data and Kiali has a dashboard to show some of it via a “monitoringdashboard” custom resource, as documented: https://kiali.io/documentation/runtimes-monitoring/#_envoy

With that, you can track down for instance envoy’s memory footprint (possibly comparing it to application memory footprint). Or pod uptime, or active connections, etc.

Here’s how it looks like:

Capture d’écran de 2020-02-11 11-20-54
Capture d’écran de 2020-02-11 11-20-541675×919 65.8 KB

Today in Kiali, this dashboard is activated either via pods annotations or by customizing the dashboard CR (with discoverOn field) as explained in doc. But maybe we should make them more visible and opt-out? Please tell us what you think:

  • No, keep it unchanged
  • Make it more visible, I don’t really care how
  • Yes, should be configured via Kiali CR / operator, disabled by default
  • Yes, should be configured via Kiali CR / operator, enabled by default
  • Yes, keep current config but turn it enabled by default
  • I don’t care / no opinion

0 voters

Also, if you’re interested in Kiali features & evolution, don’t hesitate to take a look & upvote features that you’d like to see.

3 Likes
2

didn’t know that this was a thing

3

Very neat. Are there any performance concerns with turning it on by default?

4

Thanks @polothy - you’re right I didn’t tell much about the drawbacks, but as far as I can tell there’s very few. It’s mostly a matter of UX: a new tab with a new dashboard is more information to show and places to look at, so this data better has to be valuable to the users - else it’s complicating the UX for nothing.

In terms of performances, it’s almost 0 overhead. First, there’s nothing like a background job / daemon in Kiali for that, so even if there was an overhead it would be only when a user clicks on workload/app details. But even there, it pretty much 0 because even today Kiali looks for matching dashboards to display ; having it match or not doesn’t change processing time, and the additional element to draw on the UI is minimal until you click on the Envoy tab.

(^^^ @jshaughn by the way, yesterday I told you the opposite, i was wrong :slight_smile: )

5

Thanks, voted :smiley: