Perses

Perses configuration

The Perses community dashboards provide preconfigured Perses dashboards for the most relevant mesh metrics. Although Kiali offers similar views in its metrics dashboards, it is not in Kiali’s goals to provide the advanced querying options, nor the highly customizable settings, that are available in Perses. They are the same as those provided by Istio’s Grafana add-on. Thus, it is recommended that you use Perses if you need those advanced options.

Kiali, from version v2.15, can provide a direct link from its metric dashboards to the equivalent or most similar Perses dashboard, which is convenient if you need the powerful Perses options.

The Perses links will appear in the Kiali metrics pages. For example:

For these links to appear in Kiali you need to manually configure the Perses URL and the dashboards that come preconfigured with Istio, like in the following example:

spec:
  external_services:
    perses:
      enabled: true
      # Perses service name is "perses" and is in the "telemetry" namespace.
      internal_url: 'http://perses.telemetry:4000/'
      # Public facing URL of Perses
      external_url: 'http://my-ingress-host/perses'
      dashboards:
        - name: "Istio Service Dashboard"
          variables:
            namespace: "var-namespace"
            service: "var-service"
            datasource: "var-datasource"
        - name: "Istio Workload Dashboard"
          variables:
            namespace: "var-namespace"
            workload: "var-workload"
        - name: "Istio Mesh Dashboard"

        - name: "Istio Ztunnel Dashboard"
          variables:
            namespace: "var-namespace"
            workload: "var-workload"
      # Perses project
      project: "istio"

Perses authentication configuration

The Kiali CR provides authentication configuration that will be used to connect to your perses instance and for detecting your perses version in the Mesh graph.

Just basic authentication is supported. This will be configured in Perses as native authentication.

spec:
  external_services:
    perses:
      enabled: true
      auth:
        ca_file: ""
        insecure_skip_verify: false
        password: "pwd"
        type: "basic"
        username: "user"
      health_check_url: ""

To configure a secret to be used as a user or password, see this FAQ entry