rancher-charts/charts/rancher-istio/103.1.2+up1.19.6

Rancher-Istio Chart

Our Istio installer wraps the istioctl binary commands in a handy helm chart, including an overlay file option to allow complex customization.

See the app-readme for known issues and deprecations.

Installation Requirements

Chart Dependencies

• rancher-monitoring chart or other Prometheus installation

Install

To install the rancher-istio chart with helm, use the following command:

helm install rancher-istio <location/of/the/rancher-istio/chart> --create-namespace -n istio-system

Uninstall

To ensure rancher-istio uninstalls correctly, you must uninstall rancher-istio prior to uninstalling chart dependencies (see chart dependencies for list of dependencies). This is because all definitions need to be available in order to properly build the rancher-istio objects for removal.

If you remove dependent CRD charts prior to removing rancher-istio, you may encounter the following error: Error: uninstallation completed with 1 error(s): unable to build kubernetes objects for delete: unable to recognize "": no matches for kind "MonitoringDashboard" in version "monitoring.kiali.io/v1alpha1"

Addons

The addons that are included with rancher-istio are:

• Kiali
• Jaeger

Each addon has additional customization and dependencies required for them to work as expected. Use the values.yaml to customize or to enable/disable each addon.

Kiali Addon

Kiali allows you to view and manage your istio-based service mesh through an easy to use dashboard.

Kiali Dependencies

rancher-monitoring chart or other Prometheus installation

This dependecy installs the required CRDs for installing Kiali. Since Kiali is bundled in with Istio in this chart, if you do not have these dependencies installed, your Istio installation will fail. If you do not plan on using Kiali, set kiali.enabled=false when installing Istio for a succesful installation.

Prometheus Configuration for Kiali

Note: The following configuration options assume you have installed the dependecies for Kiali. Please ensure you have Promtheus in your cluster before proceeding.

The Rancher Monitoring app sets prometheus.prometheusSpec.ignoreNamespaceSelectors=false which means all namespaces will be scraped by Prometheus by default. This ensures you can view traffic, metrics and graphs for resources deployed in other namespaces.

To limit scraping to specific namespaces, set prometheus.prometheusSpec.ignoreNamespaceSelectors=true and add one of the following configurations to ensure you can continue to view traffic, metrics and graphs for your deployed resources.

1. Add a Service Monitor or Pod Monitor in the namespace with the targets you want to scrape.
2. Add an additionalScrapeConfig to your rancher-monitoring instance to scrape all targets in all namespaces.

Kiali External Services

The external services that can be configured in Kiali are: Prometheus, Grafana and Tracing.

Prometheus

The kiali.external_services.prometheus url is set in the values.yaml:

http://{{ .Values.nameOverride }}-prometheus.{{ .Values.namespaceOverride }}.svc:{{ prometheus.service.port }}

The url depends on the default values for nameOverride, namespaceOverride, and prometheus.service.port being set in your rancher-monitoring or other monitoring instance.

Grafana

The kiali.external_services.grafana url is set in the values.yaml:

http://{{ .Values.nameOverride }}-grafana.{{ .Values.namespaceOverride }}.svc:{{ grafana.service.port }}

The url depends on the default values for nameOverride, namespaceOverride, and grafana.service.port being set in your rancher-monitoring or other monitoring instance.

Tracing

The kiali.external_services.tracing url and .Values.tracing.contextPath is set in the rancher-istio values.yaml:

http://tracing.{{ .Values.namespaceOverride }}.svc:{{ .Values.service.externalPort }}/{{ .Values.tracing.contextPath }}

The url depends on the default values for namespaceOverride, and .Values.service.externalPort being set in your rancher-tracing or other tracing instance.

Jaeger Addon

Jaeger allows you to trace and monitor distributed microservices.

Note: This addon is using the all-in-one Jaeger installation which is not qualified for production. Use the Jaeger Tracing documentation to determine which installation you will need for your production needs.