Tetrate Istio Subscription Plus Architecture

Tetrate Istio Subscription Plus (TIS Plus) is a hosted observability solution designed to work seamlessly with your existing Istio service mesh deployments. It provides comprehensive visibility into your Istio-enabled clusters without the need to manage additional infrastructure.

Leveraging Istio Service Mesh

TIS Plus is designed to work with existing Istio service mesh deployments. It does not deploy or manage Istio itself but rather focuses on collecting and aggregating observability data from Istio-enabled clusters. Istio, which uses the highly-capable Envoy proxy, provides a range of observability capabilities that TIS Plus leverages:

• Service discovery information
• Metrics on service interactions
• Distributed tracing
• Access logs
• Service-level and mesh-level telemetry

The TIS Plus Control Plane

To enable TIS Plus observability in a cluster, you need to install the lightweight TIS Plus Control Plane. This process does two things:

• Installs the TIS Plus Control Plane components in the cluster
• Configures the existing Istio mesh to send telemetry to TIS Plus

The TIS Plus Control Plane is a lightweight service responsible for collecting and forwarding application and cluster telemetry to the central Management Plane. It does not manage or modify the Istio configuration, focusing solely on observability data collection.

The TIS Plus Management Plane

The TIS Plus Management Plane is a hosted service managed by Tetrate. As a customer, you don't need to worry about deploying or maintaining this component.

The Management Plane is where you interact with TIS Plus, through GUI, CLI, and APIs. You can visualize the state of managed clusters, view metrics, traces, and logs, and manage access controls for observability data.

Understanding the Data Flow

At a high level, observability data flows from the Istio-enabled clusters to the TIS Plus Control Planes, and then to the hosted Management Plane:

• Istio generates metrics, traces, and logs in each cluster
• The TIS Plus Control Plane collects this data and sends it to the Management Plane
• The Management Plane processes and stores the data for visualization and analysis

Interacting with TIS Plus

You interact with TIS Plus primarily through its user-friendly web interface.

Architected for Scalability and Reliability

The TIS Plus architecture is designed to provide scalable and reliable observability for your Istio deployments:

Hosted Management Plane

The TIS Plus Management Plane is a hosted service, managed and maintained by Tetrate. This ensures high availability and reliability of the central observability platform without additional operational overhead for customers.

Lightweight Control Planes

The TIS Plus Control Planes deployed in your clusters are lightweight and focused solely on observability data collection. They do not interfere with your Istio control plane or data plane operations, minimizing the risk of impacting your services.

Multi-Cluster Support

TIS Plus is designed to collect and aggregate observability data from multiple Istio-enabled clusters. This allows you to gain a unified view of your services across your entire infrastructure, regardless of where they are deployed.

Data Retention and Scalability

The hosted Management Plane is designed to handle large volumes of observability data. It implements efficient data storage and retrieval mechanisms to provide fast access to historical data while managing storage costs.

Access Control

TIS Plus implements fine-grained access control, allowing you to manage who can view observability data from different services or clusters. This helps in maintaining data security and compliance in multi-team environments.

By leveraging this architecture, TIS Plus provides a scalable, reliable, and easy-to-use observability solution for your Istio-enabled infrastructure, without the operational overhead of managing the observability platform itself.