Topology view

The MENU > TOPOLOGY page of the Service Mesh Manager web interface displays the topology of services and workloads inside the mesh, and annotates it with real-time and information about latency, throughput, or HTTP request failures. You can also display historical data by adjusting the timeline.

The topology view is almost entirely based on metrics: metrics received from Prometheus and enhanced with information from Kubernetes.

The topology page serves as a starting point of diagnosing problems within the mesh. Service Mesh Manager is integrated with Grafana and Jaeger for easy access to in-depth monitoring and distributed traces) of various services.

Topology view of the demo cluster Topology view of the demo cluster

The nodes in the graph are services or workloads, while the arrows represent network connections between different services. This is based on Istio metrics retrieved from Prometheus.

For certain services like MySQL and PostgreSQL, protocol-specific metrics normally not available in Istio are also shown, for example, sessions or transactions per second.

Note: Protocol-specific metrics for MySQL and PostgreSQL are available only for certain versions of MySQL and PostgreSQL. For details, see the documentation of the MySQL and the PostgreSQL Envoy filters.

For example, the following image shows SQL sessions and transactions per second.

Protocol-specific data Protocol-specific data

The graph serves as a visual monitoring tool, as it displays various errors and metrics in the system. Click the ? icon on the left to show a legend of the graph to better understand what the icons mean in the graph. Virtual machines integrated into the mesh are displayed as workloads with the Virtual machine workload icon in their corner.

Topology view legend Topology view legend

If your application hasn’t received any traffic yet, there will be no metrics in the system so you won’t see any visualization yet. To send some traffic to your services as a test, see Generate test load.

Select the data displayed

You can select and configure what is displayed on the graph in the top bar of the screen. You can also display historical data using the TIMELINE.

Configure the topology view Configure the topology view

Namespaces

Display data only for the selected namespaces.

Resources

You can select the type of resources you want to display in the graph. The following resources can be displayed in a cluster: clusters, namespaces, apps, services, and workloads.

Workloads are always shown, they cannot be disabled.

Here’s an example when only apps, services and workloads are shown:

Show selected resources of the mesh Show selected resources of the mesh

Showing clusters is important in multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments. For details, see Multi-cluster.

Edge labels

The labels on the edges of the graph can display various real-time information about the traffic between services. You can display the following information:

  • the protocol used in the communication (HTTP, gRPC, TCP) and the request rate (or throughput for TCP connections),
  • actual P95 latency, or
  • whether the connection is using mTLS or not.

For certain services like MySQL and PostgreSQL, protocol-specific metrics normally not available in Istio are also shown, for example, sessions or transactions per second.

Note: Protocol-specific metrics for MySQL and PostgreSQL are available only for certain versions of MySQL and PostgreSQL. For details, see the documentation of the MySQL and the PostgreSQL Envoy filters.

Show information on the graph edges Show information on the graph edges

Timeline

By default, the graph displays the current data. The timeline view allows you to select a specific point in time, and then move minutes back and forth to see how your most important metrics have changed. For example, you can use it to check how things changed for a specific service, when did the error rates go up, or how your latency values have changed over time when RPS values increased. This can be a good indicator to know where to look for errors in the logs, or to notice if something else has changed in the cluster that can be related to a specific failure.

  • To display the timeline, select TIMELINE on the left, then use the timeline bar to adjust the date and the time. The date corresponding to the displayed data is shown below the topology graph.
  • To return to the current real-time data, select LIVE.

Show historical topology and metrics Show historical topology and metrics

Drill-down to the pods and nodes

You can drill-down from the MENU > TOPOLOGY page by selecting a service or a workload in the Istio service mesh. You can trace back an issue from the top-level service mesh layer by navigating deeper in the stack, and see the status and most important metrics of your Kubernetes controllers, pods, and nodes.

See Drill-down for details.

Drill-down

Generate test load

Pod logs