Introduction

Kiali and Tempo integration introduction and prerequisites

Introduction

Kiali uses Jaeger as a default distributed tracing backend. In this tutorial, we will replace it for Grafana Tempo.

We will setup a local environment in minikube, and install Kiali with Tempo as a distributed backend. This is a simplified architecture diagram:

Kiali Tempo Architecture

  • We will install Tempo with the Tempo Operator and enable Jaeger query frontend to be compatible with Kiali in order to query traces.
  • We will setup Istio to send traces to the Tempo collector using the zipkin protocol. It is enabled by default from version 3.0 or higher of the Tempo Operator.
  • We will install MinIO and setup it up as object store, S3 compatible.

Environment

We use the following environment:

  • Istio 1.18.1
  • Kiali 1.72
  • Minikube 1.30
  • Tempo operator TempoStack v3.0

There are different installation methods for Grafana Tempo, but in this tutorial we will use the Tempo operator.

Last modified September 26, 2023: New tracing section in configuration (#692) (79cce5e)