Istio

Istio Integration in Dash0

Istio is one of the most commonly used service meshes. Istio configures Envoy instances under the hood and handles networking for you. Service meshes are somewhat complex, and visibility into their activity can be the difference between easy troubleshooting and a long-winded analysis.

Use Cases

Enhance observability and gain actionable insights into Istio-managed services:

• See Istio's Routing Decisions: Visualize and understand how Istio routes traffic within your service mesh.
• Gain API Insights: Access detailed information about all APIs exposed via the service mesh, regardless of backend tracing.
• Understand Unrouted Requests: Identify and analyze requests that cannot be routed for improved troubleshooting and performance.

Overview

Istio has native support for the generation of OpenTelemetry sigals:

• metrics
• tracing
• access logs

Perfect for the integration with Dash0.

Configure

Setup OpenTelemetry collector

The best practice is using an opentelemetry collector instead of sending telemetry to backend (Dash0) directly. An easy way is using opentelemetry-collector helm chart.

Step 1: Create Dash0 Authorization Secret

Before deploying the OpenTelemetry Collector, create a secret in the monitoring namespace to store your Dash0 Authorization Token:

This secret allows the OpenTelemetry Collector to authenticate with Dash0 and send telemetry data.

Step 2: Deploy OpenTelemetry Collector

An example of values.yaml file would be

Enable metrics

Istio exposes metrics in default via annotations:

With an OpenTelemetry collector as shown above we can scrape and export metrics to Dash0. See istio prometheus integration.

Enable Tracing

You need to add an extensionProvider and enable tracing.

Next, enable tracing:

An istio service entry for the OpenTelemetry collector service is normally required. Make sure the port name starts with grpc-