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Service Mesh

The default service mesh stack integrated in a CodeNOW Dataplane is Istio with Kiali as the dashboarding and observability layer. Kiali provides a visual representation of the service mesh topology and exposes traffic metrics, health status, and configuration validation for all services running in the cluster.

Kiali Dashboard​

Kiali connects to Istio and presents real-time data about service-to-service communication across the mesh.

Key capabilities available through the Kiali dashboard:

  • Visualize the service mesh graph — services, workloads, and the traffic flowing between them
  • Monitor request rates, error rates, and latency per service and per connection
  • Inspect Istio configuration (VirtualServices, DestinationRules, Gateways) and validate correctness
  • View distributed traces correlated with mesh traffic (when Tempo integration is configured)
  • Identify unhealthy services and misconfigured Istio resources

For reference on Kiali features, see the Kiali documentation.

Access​

Service Mesh dashboards are accessible per Dataplane — the Self-Service Portal links directly to the Kiali instance on the relevant Dataplane. Each Dataplane maintains its own Kiali and Istio installation, keeping mesh data strictly isolated between clusters.