Understanding TIS Plus and Istio

Tetrate Istio Subscription Plus (TIS Plus) is a hosted observability solution that leverages Istio to provide comprehensive visibility into your Kubernetes clusters and services. With TIS Plus, users can gain deep insights into their service mesh, including metrics, traces, and logs.

Summary

Tetrate Istio Subscription Plus (TIS Plus) is designed to work with existing Istio deployments in Kubernetes clusters. It does not manage or modify Istio configuration, but instead focuses on collecting and aggregating observability data from Istio-enabled environments.

Users interact with TIS Plus through its intuitive UI, which provides a rich set of visualizations and analytics tools built on top of Istio's telemetry capabilities. TIS Plus offers multi-cluster visibility, advanced querying, and customizable dashboards, enhancing the basic observability features provided by Istio.

TIS Plus maintains each cluster's observability data, allowing it to provide up-to-date insights into complex, dynamic scenarios such as cross-cluster traffic, service dependencies, and performance bottlenecks.

Leveraging Istio's Observability Features

TIS Plus takes full advantage of Istio's built-in observability features:

1. Metrics: Istio generates detailed metrics about service-to-service communications, which TIS Plus collects and analyzes to provide insights into service performance and health.
2. Distributed Tracing: Istio's distributed tracing capabilities allow TIS Plus to provide end-to-end visibility into request flows across your services.
3. Access Logs: TIS Plus can collect and analyze Istio's access logs to provide detailed information about individual requests and responses.
4. Service Mesh Overview: TIS Plus leverages Istio's service registry to provide a comprehensive view of your service mesh topology.

TIS Plus Observability Enhancements

While Istio provides powerful observability features, TIS Plus enhances these capabilities:

1. Multi-Cluster Visibility: TIS Plus aggregates data from multiple Istio-enabled clusters, providing a unified view of your entire service mesh landscape. This allows you to understand service interactions and performance across your entire infrastructure from a single pane of glass.
2. Simplified Data Visualization: TIS Plus offers an intuitive user interface that makes it easy to visualize and understand the wealth of observability data generated by Istio. This includes service topology maps, traffic flow visualizations, and pre-configured dashboards for common metrics.
3. Workspace-Based Access Control: TIS Plus implements a workspace concept that allows you to organize services and control access to observability data. This makes it easier to manage observability in large, multi-team environments while maintaining proper data access controls.
4. Integrated Metrics, Traces, and Logs: TIS Plus brings together metrics, distributed traces, and logs in a single interface. This integration allows for easier correlation of different types of observability data, streamlining the process of understanding service behavior and troubleshooting issues.
5. Service Mesh Insights: By analyzing data from across your Istio deployments, TIS Plus can provide insights into your overall service mesh health, including information about mTLS adoption, traffic patterns, and potential configuration issues.

Data Collection and Processing

TIS Plus deploys a lightweight agent in your Istio-enabled clusters to collect observability data. This agent works alongside Istio without interfering with its operations:

1. The TIS Plus agent collects metrics, traces, and logs generated by Istio.
2. This data is securely transmitted to the TIS Plus hosted platform.
3. The TIS Plus platform processes and stores this data, making it available through the UI.

Conclusion

TIS Plus enhances the observability capabilities of your Istio-enabled environments without requiring changes to your existing Istio configuration. By leveraging Istio's telemetry features and adding advanced analytics, multi-cluster visibility, and a user-friendly interface, TIS Plus provides a comprehensive observability solution for your service mesh.