Tools (schemas)

Kiali Chatbot uses internal MCP-style tools (implemented inside Kiali) to fetch live data and perform safe actions. These are not external MCP server tools.

The AI assistant’s tools respect the logged-in user’s namespace access permissions: the assistant cannot retrieve logs, metrics, graphs, resources or traces for a namespace the user cannot access.

Administrators can control which of these tools are exposed to the AI by using ai.chat.tools for global filtering and ai.chat.providers[].tools for provider-specific filtering. Use the exact tool names below in enabled_tools and disabled_tools.

The tool input schemas are defined in Kiali under kiali/ai/mcp/tools/*.yaml. The tool outputs are JSON structures returned by the Kiali backend and consumed by the model and/or UI.

Tool list

• get_action_ui: returns UI navigation actions (buttons/links).
• get_logs: returns workload or pod logs with optional filtering.
• get_mesh_status: returns high-level mesh health, control plane, observability stack, and connectivity status.
• get_mesh_traffic_graph: returns a compact service-to-service traffic topology with metrics such as throughput, response time, and mTLS.
• get_metrics: returns Istio or Envoy metrics for services, workloads, or apps.
• get_pod_performance: returns current pod CPU and memory usage versus requests and limits.
• get_referenced_docs: returns relevant Istio and Kiali documentation links.
• get_trace_details: returns the hierarchy and span details for a specific trace.
• list_or_get_resources: lists resources or returns details for services, workloads, apps, and namespaces.
• list_traces: returns a compact list of distributed traces for a service.
• manage_istio_config_read: lists or gets Istio config in read-only mode.
• manage_istio_config: creates, patches, or deletes Istio config with a confirmation flow for sensitive actions.