Overview
Review built-in and optional observability tools to monitor the health of your service mesh.
Gloo management plane
The following observability tools are available by default when you install the Gloo management plane. To get started, deploy the Gloo Mesh management plane. Then, you can review the following telemetry tools to collect data for your service mesh.
Gloo UI
The Gloo UI provides an at-a-glance overview of your Istio components and workloads, pages to determine the security posture, compliance, and health of your mesh environment, and inventories of Istio-related resources such as virtual services, gateways, policies, and more. You can additionally use the Gloo UI to visualize data from other the observability tools listed on this page, such as lists of mesh insights, and telemetry data consumed from Prometheus and Jaeger.
To get started, launch and explore the Gloo UI.
Insights
Gloo Mesh comes with an insights engine that automatically analyzes your Istio setups for health issues. These issues are displayed in the UI along with recommendations to harden your Istio setups. The insights give you a checklist to address issues that might otherwise be hard to detect across your environment.For more information, see Insights.
Request traces
The Gloo telemetry pipeline integrates with Jaeger as the tracing platform. Jaeger is an open source tool that helps you follow the path of a request as it is forwarded between microservices. The chain of events and interactions are then captured by the Gloo telemetry pipeline and visualized in the Jaeger UI that is embedded in the Gloo UI. You can use this data to troubleshoot issues in your microservices and identify bottlenecks. You can also forward the traces from the Gloo telemetry gateway to your own Jaeger tracing platform.
To get started, enable request traces to observe traffic requests in Jaeger.
Metrics
During your installation, you have the option to deploy a Gloo Prometheus server alongside the Gloo telemetry pipeline that you can use to monitor the health of the Istio resources in your cluster. Prometheus is a powerful time series database that you can use to visualize, analyze, and operate on metrics that are collected from your environment, including default Istio metrics.
For an overview of the default Prometheus setup and configuration options, see the Prometheus overview. To review specific metrics that are collected for Istio, see Default metrics.
Access logs
Leverage the default Envoy access log collector to record logs for the Istio ingress gateway and Istio-enabled workloads in your service mesh. You can then review these logs to troubleshoot issues as-needed, or scrape these logs to view them in your larger platform logging system.
To get started, enable the default Envoy access log collector in your Istio installation.
Layer 7 telemetry for ztunnels
This feature requires your mesh to be installed with the Solo distribution of Istio and an Enterprise-level license for Gloo Mesh. Contact your account representative to obtain a valid license.
When you use community Istio for your ambient mesh, ztunnel is configured to generate TCP metrics, logs, and traces for all service traffic in the ambient mesh. In addition, when you use the Solo distribution of Istio with an Enterprise level Gloo Mesh license, Layer 7 (L7) HTTP and HTTP/2 telemetry data is enabled by default when using waypoint proxies. For an overview of how this telemetry data is collected, as well as examples of the enriched data you can find in access logs, traces, and metrics, see Layer 7 observability for ztunnels.