Accessing Kiali

Introduction

After Kiali is succesfully installed you will need to make Kiali accessible to users. This page describes some popular methods of exposing Kiali for use.

If exposing Kiali in a custom way, you may need to set some configurations to make Kiali aware of how users will access Kiali.

Accessing Kiali using port forwarding

You can use port-forwarding to access Kiali by running any of these commands:

# If you have oc command line tool
oc port-forward svc/kiali 20001:20001 -n istio-system
# If you have kubectl command line tool
kubectl port-forward svc/kiali 20001:20001 -n istio-system

These commands will block. Access Kiali by visiting https://localhost:20001/ in your preferred web browser.

Accessing Kiali through an Ingress

You can configure Kiali to be installed with an Ingress resource defined, allowing you to access the Kiali UI through the Ingress. By default, an Ingress will not be created. You can enable a simple Ingress by setting spec.deployment.ingress.enabled to true in the Kiali CR (a similar setting for the server Helm chart is available if you elect to install Kiali via Helm as opposed to the Kiali Operator).

Exposing Kiali externally through this spec.deployment.ingress mechanism is a convenient way of exposing Kiali externally but it will not necessarily work or be the best way to do it because the way in which you should expose Kiali externally will be highly dependent on your specific cluster environment and how services are exposed generally for that environment.

The default Ingress that is created will be configured for a typical NGinx implementation. If you have your own Ingress implementation you want to use, you can override the default configuration through the settings spec.deployment.ingress.override_yaml and spec.deployment.ingress.class_name. More details on customizing the Ingress can be found below.

The Ingress IP or domain name should then be used to access the Kiali UI. To find your Ingress IP or domain name, as per the Kubernetes documentation, try the following command (though this may not work if using Minikube without the ingress addon):

kubectl get ingress kiali -n istio-system -o jsonpath='{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}'

If it doesn’t work, unfortunately, it depends on how and where you had setup your cluster. There are several Ingress controllers available and some cloud providers have their own controller or preferred exposure method. Check the documentation of your cloud provider. You may need to customize the pre-installed Ingress rule or expose Kiali using a different method.

Customizing the Ingress resource

The created Ingress resource will route traffic to Kiali regardless of the domain in the URL. You may need a more specific Ingress resource that routes traffic to Kiali only on a specific domain or path. To do this, you can specify route settings.

Alternatively, and for more advanced Ingress configurations, you can provide your own Ingress declaration in the Kiali CR. For example:

spec:
  deployment:
    ingress:
      class_name: "nginx"
      enabled: true
      override_yaml:
        metadata:
          annotations:
            nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/secure-backends: "true"
            nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/backend-protocol: "HTTPS"
        spec:
          rules:
          - http:
              paths:
              - path: /kiali
                backend:
                  serviceName: kiali
                  servicePort: 20001

Accessing Kiali in Minikube

If you enabled the Ingress controller, the default Ingress resource created by the installation (mentioned in the previous section) should be enough to access Kiali. The following command should open Kiali in your default web browser:

xdg-open https://$(minikube ip)/kiali

Accessing Kiali through a LoadBalancer or a NodePort

By default, the Kiali service is created with the ClusterIP type. To use a LoadBalancer or a NodePort, you can change the service type in the Kiali CR as follows:

spec:
  deployment:
    service_type: LoadBalancer

Once the Kiali operator updates the installation, you should be able to use the kubectl get svc -n istio-system kiali command to retrieve the external address (or port) to access Kiali. For example, in the following output Kiali is assigned the IP 192.168.49.201, which means that you can access Kiali by visiting http://192.168.49.201:20001 in a browser:

NAME    TYPE           CLUSTER-IP       EXTERNAL-IP      PORT(S)                          AGE
kiali   LoadBalancer   10.105.236.127   192.168.49.201   20001:31966/TCP,9090:30128/TCP   34d

If you are using the LoadBalancer service type to directly expose the Kiali service, you may want to check the available options for the HTTP Server and Metrics server.

Accessing Kiali through an Istio Ingress Gateway

If you want to take advantage of Istio’s infrastructure, you can expose Kiali using an Istio Ingress Gateway. The Istio documentation provides a good guide explaining how to expose the sample add-ons. Even if the Istio guide is focused on the sample add-ons, the steps are the same to expose a Kiali installed using this Installation guide.

Accessing Kiali in OpenShift

By default, Kiali is exposed through a Route if installed on OpenShift. The following command should open Kiali in your default web browser:

xdg-open https://$(oc get routes -n istio-system kiali -o jsonpath='{.spec.host}')/console

Specifying route settings

If you are using your own exposure method or if you are using one of the methods mentioned in this page, you may need to configure the route that is being used to access Kiali.

In the Kiali CR, route settings are broken in several attributes. For example, to specify that Kiali is being accessed under the https://apps.example.com:8080/dashboards/kiali URI, you would need to set the following:

spec:
  server:
    web_fqdn: apps.example.com
    web_port: 8080
    web_root: /dashboards/kiali
    web_schema: https

If you are letting the installation create an Ingress resource for you, the Ingress will be adjusted to match these route settings. If you are using your own exposure method, these spec.server settings are only making Kiali aware of what its public endpoint is.

It is possible to omit these settings and Kiali may be able to discover some of these configurations, depending on your exposure method. For example, if you are exposing Kiali via LoadBalancer or NodePort service types, Kiali can discover most of these settings. If you are using some kind of Ingress, Kiali will honor X-Forwarded-Proto, X-Forwarded-Host and X-Forwarded-Port HTTP headers if they are properly injected in the request.

The web_root receives special treatment, because this is the path where Kiali will serve itself (both the user interface and its api). This is useful if you are serving multiple applications under the same domain. It must begin with a slash and trailing slashes must be omitted. The default value is /kiali for Kubernetes and / for OpenShift.