Kiali Does Not See istio-ingressgateway Installed in Separate Kubernetes Namespace

When using a Helm chart for Kiali server deployment, the default values file does not have an option to specify a different namespace for istio-ingressgateway. It defaults to the “istio_namespace” setting, which is usually istio-system.

The Problem

We have Istio installed into istio-system namespace, Istio Ingress Gateway installed into istio-ingress namespace, and Kiali installed into istio-system namespace.

When using Kiali WebUI for Istio component status page, the follow error message is displayed:

“istio-ingressgateway Not found”.

The Solution

If we take a look at Kiali operator file, we will find the following options defined:

    istio:
      component_status:
        components:
        - app_label: "istiod"
          is_core: true
          is_proxy: false
        - app_label: "istio-ingressgateway"
          is_core: true
          is_proxy: true
          # default: namespace is undefined
          namespace: istio-system
        - app_label: "istio-egressgateway"
          is_core: false
          is_proxy: true
          # default: namespace is undefined
          namespace: istio-system
        enabled: true

What we need to do is to update our Kiali server Helm deployment values.yaml file to include the following:

external_services:
  istio:
    root_namespace: istio-system
    component_status:
      enabled: true
      components:
      - app_label: istiod
        is_core: true
      - app_label: istio-ingressgateway
        is_core: true
        is_proxy: true
        namespace: istio-ingress

Save the changes and re-deploy using the updated values file.

GitHub Issue and a PR

https://github.com/kiali/kiali/issues/5935

References

https://github.com/kiali/kiali/discussions/3759