Configuration

How to configure Kiali to fit your needs.

The pages in this Configuration section describe most available options for managing and customizing your Kiali installation.

Unless noted, it is assumed that you are using the Kiali operator and that you are managing the Kiali installation through a Kiali CR. The provided YAML snippets for configuring Kiali should be placed in your Kiali CR. For example, the provided configuration snippet for setting up the Anonymous authentication strategy is the following:

spec:
  auth:
    strategy: anonymous

You will need to take this YAML snippet and apply it to your Kiali CR. As an example, an almost minimal Kiali CR using the previous configuration snippet would be the following:

apiVersion: kiali.io/v1alpha1
kind: Kiali
metadata:
  namespace: kiali-namespace
  name: kiali
spec:
  istio_namespace: istio-system
  deployment:
    namespace: kiali-namespace
  auth:
    strategy: anonymous

Then, you can save the finished YAML file and apply it with kubectl apply -f.

It is recommended that you read The Kiali CR and the Example Install pages of the Installation Guide for more information about using the Kiali CR.

Also, for reference, see Kiali CR Reference which documents all available options.


Authentication Strategies

Choosing and configuring the appropriate authentication strategy.

Console Customization

Default selections, find and hide presets and custom metric aggregations.

Custom Dashboards

Configuring additional, non-default dashboards.

Istio Environment

Kiali’s default configuration matches settings present in Istio’s installation configuration profiles. If you are customizing your Istio installation some Kiali settings may need to be adjusted. Also, some Istio management features can be enabled or disabled selectively.

Kiali CR Reference

Reference page for the Kiali CR. The Kiali Operator will watch for resources of this type and install Kiali according to those resources' configurations.

Namespace Management

Configuring the namespaces accessible and visible to Kiali.

Prometheus, Jaeger and Grafana

Prometheus and Jaeger are primary data sources for Kiali. This page describes how to configure Kiali to communicate with these dependencies. A minimalistic Grafana integration is also available.

Role-based access control

Configuring RBAC based on the authentication strategy.

Traffic Health

Customizing Health for Request Traffic.

Virtual Machine workloads

Ensuring Kiali can visualize a VM WorkloadEntry.