Customization options

The built-in Prometheus server is the recommended approach to feed metrics to the Gloo UI graph to visualize workload communication. However, the pod is not set up with persistent storage and metrics are lost when the pod restarts or when the deployment is scaled down. Additionally, you might want to replace the built-in Prometheus server and use your organization's own Prometheus-compatible solution or time series database that is hardened for production and integrates with other applications that might exist outside the cluster where your API Gateway runs.

Replace the built-in Prometheus server with your own instance

In this setup, you disable the built-in Prometheus instance and use your production Prometheus instance instead. This setup is a reasonable approach if you want to scrape raw Istio metrics to collect them in your production Prometheus instance. However, you cannot control the number of metrics that you collect, or federate and aggregate the metrics before you scrape them with your production Prometheus.

To query the metrics and compute results, you use the compute resources of the cluster where your production Prometheus instance runs. Note that depending on the number and complexity of the queries that you plan to run in your production Prometheus instance, especially if you use the instance to consolidate metrics of other apps as well, your production instance might get overloaded or start to respond more slowly.

Remove high cardinality labels at creation time

To reduce the amount of data that is collected, you can customize the Envoy filter in the Istio proxy deployment to modify how Istio metrics are recorded at creation time. With this setup, you can remove any unwanted cardinality labels before metrics are scraped by the built-in or your own custom Prometheus server.

1. Decide which context of the Istio Envoy filter you want to modify. Each Istio release includes an Envoy filter that is named stats-filter-<istio_version> and that defines how metrics are collected for a workload. Depending on whether you modify the Envoy filter directly or use the Istio Helm chart to configure the filter, you can choose between the following contexts:

   • SIDECAR_INBOUND or inboundSidecar: Used to collect metrics for traffic that is sent to a destination (reporter=destination).
   • SIDECAR_OUTBOUND or outboundSidecar: Used to collect metrics for traffic that leaves a microservice (reporter=source).
   • GATEWAY or gateway: Used to collect metrics for traffic that passes through the ingress gateway.

2. Decide on the metric labels you want to remove with your custom Envoy filter. To find an overview of metrics that are collected by default, see the Istio documentation. For an overview of labels that are collected, see Labels. You can start by looking at Istio histogram metrics, also referred to as distribution metrics. Histograms show the frequency distribution of data in a certain timeframe. While these metrics provide great insights and detail, they often come with lots of labels that lead to high cardinality.

   Removing labels from histograms can significantly reduce cardinality and the amount of data that you collect. For example, you might want to keep all the labels, including the high cardinality labels of the istio_request_duration_milliseconds metric to monitor request latency for your workloads. However, collecting the same high cardinality labels in histograms such as istio_request_bytes_bucket or istio_response_byte_bucket might not be important for your environment.

3. Configure your Envoy filter to remove specific labels. To apply the same configuration across all of your Istio microservices, modify the filter in the Istio Helm chart. If you want to update the configuration for a particular workload only, you can patch the Envoy filter instead.

   To find the name of the metric that you need to use in your filter configuration, see Metrics. Note that you must remove the istio_ prefix from the metric name before you add it to your filter configuration. For example, if you want to customize the request size metric, use request_bytes. To find an overview of available labels that you can remove, see Labels. Note that this page lists the labels with their actual names and not as the value that you need to provide in the Envoy filter or Helm chart. To find the corresponding label name value, refer to the Istio bootstrap config for your release.

   Upgrade your Helm installation and add the Envoy filter configuration.

   helm --kube-context=${CLUSTER1} upgrade --install istio ./istio-/manifests/charts/istio-control/istio-discovery -n istio-system --values - <<EOF
   global:
     ...
   meshConfig:
     ...
   pilot:
     ...
   telemetry:
     v2:
       prometheus:
         configOverride:
           outboundSidecar:
             metrics:
             - name: request_bytes
               tags_to_remove:
               - destination_service
               - response_flags
             - name: response_bytes
               tags_to_remove:
               - destination_service
               - response_flags
           inboundSidecar:
             disable_host_header_fallback: true
             metrics:
             - name: request_bytes
               tags_to_remove:
               - destination_service
               - response_flags
             - name: response_bytes
               tags_to_remove:
               - destination_service
               - response_flags
           gateway:
             disable_host_header_fallback: true
             metrics:
             - name: request_bytes
               tags_to_remove:
               - destination_service
               - response_flags
             - name: response_bytes
               tags_to_remove:
               - destination_service
               - response_flags
   EOF
   

   In the following example, the Envoy filter for the productpage service from the Istio Bookinfo app is modified. All other workloads in the cluster continue to use the default Istio Envoy configuration. Note that this example is specific to Istio version 1.14. If you use a different Istio version, refer to the Istio Envoy documentation.

   apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
   kind: EnvoyFilter
   metadata:
     name: stats-filter-1.14-productpage
     namespace: bookinfo-frontends
   spec:
     workloadSelector:
       labels:
         app: productpage
         version: v1
     configPatches:
     - applyTo: HTTP_FILTER
       match:
         context: SIDECAR_OUTBOUND
         listener:
           filterChain:
             filter:
               name: envoy.filters.network.http_connection_manager
               subFilter:
                 name: envoy.filters.http.router
         proxy:
           proxyVersion: ^1\.14.*
       patch:
         operation: INSERT_BEFORE
         value:
           name: istio.stats
           typed_config:
             '@type': type.googleapis.com/udpa.type.v1.TypedStruct
             type_url: type.googleapis.com/envoy.extensions.filters.http.wasm.v3.Wasm
             value:
               config:
                 configuration:
                   '@type': type.googleapis.com/google.protobuf.StringValue
                   value: |
                     {"metrics":[{"name":"request_bytes","tags_to_remove":["destination_service","response_flags"]},{"name":"response_bytes","tags_to_remove":["destination_service","response_flags"]}]}
                 root_id: stats_outbound
                 vm_config:
                   code:
                     local:
                       inline_string: envoy.wasm.stats
                   runtime: envoy.wasm.runtime.null
                   vm_id: stats_outbound
     - applyTo: HTTP_FILTER
       match:
         context: SIDECAR_INBOUND
         listener:
           filterChain:
             filter:
               name: envoy.filters.network.http_connection_manager
               subFilter:
                 name: envoy.filters.http.router
         proxy:
           proxyVersion: ^1\.14.*
       patch:
         operation: INSERT_BEFORE
         value:
           name: istio.stats
           typed_config:
             '@type': type.googleapis.com/udpa.type.v1.TypedStruct
             type_url: type.googleapis.com/envoy.extensions.filters.http.wasm.v3.Wasm
             value:
               config:
                 configuration:
                   '@type': type.googleapis.com/google.protobuf.StringValue
                   value: |
                     {"disable_host_header_fallback":true,"metrics":[{"name":"request_bytes","tags_to_remove":["destination_service","response_flags"]},{"name":"response_bytes","tags_to_remove":["destination_service","response_flags"]}]}
                 root_id: stats_inbound
                 vm_config:
                   code:
                     local:
                       inline_string: envoy.wasm.stats
                   runtime: envoy.wasm.runtime.null
                   vm_id: stats_inbound