Directory Cloud InfrastructureService Mesh & API GatewayKiali

Kiali

About Kiali

Kiali is a console for Istio service mesh. It can be installed as an Istio add-on or used as part of a production environment. The product allows users to configure, visualize, validate and troubleshoot their mesh. Starting with version 2.15, Kiali can run directly on a machine without being installed into a cluster.

Used for

Visualizing service communication
Examining logs and metrics
Following requests with distributed tracing
Editing Istio custom resource YAML

From Kiali's own website, read 2026-10-23. How we build listings.

How to evaluate Service Mesh & API Gateway

This is how the CIOPages Research Team evaluates this category. It is not an assessment of Kiali. The category covers two kinds of product, so both frameworks are here. Most buyers need one of them.

API Management Platform

25%

Gateway & Traffic Management

Performance (latency < 5ms p99), rate limiting, load balancing, circuit breaking, protocol support (REST, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSocket)

25%

Security

OAuth 2.0/OIDC, API key management, mTLS, bot detection, runtime threat protection, OWASP API Top 10 coverage

20%

Developer Experience

Developer portal, API documentation (OpenAPI/Swagger), SDK generation, sandbox environments, self-service API access

15%

Analytics & Observability

Real-time traffic analytics, API usage dashboards, error tracking, latency monitoring, consumer analytics

15%

Lifecycle Management

API design (spec-first), versioning, deprecation workflows, CI/CD integration, governance policies, API catalog

Service Mesh

25%

Security & Zero-Trust Identity

Automatic mTLS for all service-to-service traffic, workload identity (SPIFFE/SVID) and certificate issuance/rotation, L4 and L7 authorization policy, integration with an external CA or your PKI, and FIPS-validated cryptography if you are regulated

25%

Day-Two Operations & Lifecycle

Upgrade mechanics and whether they force app-pod restarts, control-plane and certificate-authority operability, blast radius of a control-plane failure, debuggability of the data plane, multi-cluster lifecycle, and the realistic platform-team headcount to own it

20%

Data-Plane Architecture & Performance

Sidecar vs. eBPF vs. ambient model, per-pod or per-node resource overhead, added per-hop latency, behavior with ‘server-speaks-first’ and non-HTTP protocols, and whether L7 features can be adopted incrementally rather than all-or-nothing

15%

Traffic Management & Resilience

Request routing and canary/blue-green shifting, retries, timeouts, circuit breaking and outlier detection, fault injection for testing, multi-cluster and multi-zone failover, and east-west traffic policy beyond a single cluster

10%

Observability & Topology

Golden signals (latency, traffic, errors, saturation) per service with zero code change, distributed-trace context propagation, a live service-dependency map, and clean export to your existing Prometheus/Grafana/OpenTelemetry stack

Ecosystem, Support & Governance

Project maturity and governance (CNCF status, breadth of maintainers, single-vendor vs. neutral control), OSS license vs. source-available terms, Kubernetes Gateway API / GAMMA support, and the quality of available commercial support and managed options

Other Service Mesh & API Gateway Vendors

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Quick Facts

www.kiali.io

CategoryCloud Infrastructure

SubcategoryService Mesh & API Gateway

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