Datadog Blog Monitor your Istio service mesh with Datadog

As application architecture moves from monoliths to microservices, observability has become a growing challenge. The services that make up a distributed application, and the many dependencies and communication pathways between them, are difficult to govern and observe. You can get more control and visibility of your application by including a service mesh-a layer of infrastructure that manages traffic among microservices.Istio is an open source service mesh that makes it easy to secure, configure, and monitor the services that make up an application. With Istio as part of your application, you can collect metrics that help you understand how your service mesh is performing. To help you visualize performance data from your service architecture, we're pleased to announce Datadog's new Istio integration.Istio's internalsIstio routes traffic among microservices, and it allows operators to dynamically apply rules that govern the network's behavior. Istio is comprised of a data plane, which is the infrastructure that manages the traffic to and from the services, and a control plane, which provides the means of configuring and monitoring the data plane.Planes and cloudsIstio's data plane is Envoy, an open source proxy created by Lyft. Istio deploys one Envoy proxy for each service in the mesh. This is known as a sidecar pattern: each service talks only to its paired Envoy proxy, which routes messages to and from other services in the mesh, subject to rules applied via the control plane.Using Istio's control plane, an application's operator can dynamically configure sidecars, coordinating their behavior to provide capabilities like load balancing, authentication, and service discovery. Because Envoy handles these concerns, application developers don't need to build network awareness into the services, which reduces the complexity of the service code.Istio is platform independent. Istio 1.0-the current version-supports applications on Kubernetes, or on Nomad (for service scheduling) with Consul (for service discovery). Because it works with Kubernetes, you can use Istio with managed Kubernetes services offered by major cloud providers, including Google (GKE), Amazon Web Services (EKS), and Azure (AKS).Collecting metricsIstio uses adapters to connect to infrastructure backends-external services that extend your application with functionality like authentication, logging, and monitoring. A Prometheus adapter is enabled by default, and once you've configured Datadog's Istio integration, the Datadog Agent automatically begins collecting metrics from Istio's Prometheus endpoint. To visualize custom metrics from your service mesh in Datadog, you can also configure Istio's Datadog adapter.Envoy proxies all traffic to and from the services within the application. Each time an Envoy sidecar processes a request, it sends metadata to Istio, including the request's size, time, source, and destination. Istio then sends these metadata values-known as attributes-to the Prometheus and Datadog adapters so the Agent can submit metrics to your Datadog account.Visualizing Istio's performanceOnce you're collecting Istio metrics, you can create a dashboard to visualize data about the requests made by your services, your network activity, and details of Istio's resource consumption.An Istio dashboard shows throughput and resource usage. You can customize this dashboard to show other metrics and APM data to monitor your entire application in a single view.You can easily collect metrics from Istio's related technologies, including Kubernetes and Envoy. You can also collect logs and distributed tracing data from your services themselves, and combine all this data in a custom Datadog dashboard to monitor your entire application.Monitor your service mesh with DatadogDatadog's new Istio integration-one of over 250 integrations available in Datadog-can help you increase visibility into your distributed application by monitoring all the components of your service mesh. If you're running Istio in a Kubernetes cluster, you can add the Agent as a DaemonSet to ensure it's collecting metrics from all your nodes. If you configure the Agent's Autodiscovery capabilities, you'll continue to collect metrics even as your containers come and go.If you're not already using Datadog, you can start today with a full-featured, free two-week trial.