Install TIS Central

This page describes how to install the TIS Dashboard Central component. The Central component is deployed in the main cluster and is responsible for aggregating data from all connected clusters. The Central component includes a user-friendly UI that allows administrators to view and analyze the collected data. This component can be deployed in one of your Istio clusters, serving as the hub for data collection and visualization.

Before you begin

Please ensure you have the following prerequisites:

1. A Kubernetes cluster with the kubectl configured to communicate with your cluster. You can deploy TIS Dashboard on same cluster where Istio is deployed or on a separate cluster.
2. helm tool (version 3.6 or later).
3. Credentials from Tetrate to access Tetrate's private repository. Set your credential as env variable:

   export TIS_USER="<tis-username>"
   export TIS_PASS="<tis-password>"

TIS Central Load Balancer Port

By default, the TIS Dashboard Central is exposed as a Load Balancer service using port 8080 for HTTP traffic and 9090 for gRPC traffic.

Enable TLS

For production deployments, it is recommended to enable TLS for the TIS Dashboard Central. Please refer to the Enable TLS for TIS Central for more information.

TIS Central Installation Steps

1. Add Tetrate Helm repo

   Add Tetrate's Helm repo, and verify you can see the TIS Dashboard releases:

   helm repo add tis https://tis.tetrate.io/charts
   helm repo update tis
   
   helm search repo tis/central

2. Determine install version

   You can get the TIS Dashboard latest release by using following command:

   helm search repo tis/central

   Or you can list all available releases:

   helm search repo tis/central --versions

   Set $VERSION using Helm version that you want to install, for example 1.0.0.

   export VERSION="1.0.0"

3. Create image pull secret

   Create a new namespace and an image secret with your credentials:

   kubectl create namespace tis
   
   kubectl create secret docker-registry tetrate-tis-creds \
       --docker-server="addon-containers.istio.tetratelabs.com" \
       --docker-username=${TIS_USER} \
       --docker-password=${TIS_PASS} \
       --docker-email="${USER}@" \
       -n tis

4. Install TIS Dashboard Central

   Customizing Installation

   You can get the list of all available configuration options by running helm show values tis/central.

   Before installing the TIS Dashboard, set admin password. If not set, the default password is admin.

   export TIS_ADMIN_PASS="<admin-password>"

   Then install the TIS Dashboard Central component. You also need to set the service.cve.token value. This token is required to access the Tetrate CVE backend. Tetrate has provided a utility to get the token by passing your TIS password.

   helm install central tis/central \
       -n tis \
       --create-namespace \
       --version ${VERSION} \
       --set service.cve.token=$(curl -fsSL "https://tis.tetrate.io/tokens?name=tvs&pass=$TIS_PASS") \
       --set 'image.pullSecrets[0].name=tetrate-tis-creds' \
       --set user.admin.password=${TIS_ADMIN_PASS}
   note

   If the password variable is not correctly set during the install, it will be configured as blank and you'll not be able to access. Run helm upgrade with the variable set in order to fix the installation.

   After a few seconds, verify that the TIS Dashboard central releases are installed and that the central pod is running:

   helm ls -n tis
   kubectl get pods -n tis

5. Access TIS Dashboard UI

   By default, the TIS Dashboard Central is exposed as a Load Balancer service using port 8080. You can access the UI by finding the Load Balancer IP address or hostname and service port:

   Run the following command to get the Load Balancer IP address and service port

   kubectl get svc tis-central-plane-lb -n tis -o jsonpath='{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}:{.spec.ports[0].port}'

   If you use AWS, you need to get the Load Balancer DNS name:

   kubectl get svc tis-central-plane-lb -n tis -o jsonpath='{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].hostname}:{.spec.ports[0].port}'

   Open a web browser and navigate to http://<ip-or-hostname>:<port> from above command output to access the TIS Dashboard UI. Use the admin username admin and the password you set earlier.

6. Install TIS Agent

   Install TIS Agent to onboard your Istio clusters to the TIS Dashboard.

Upgrade TIS Central

To upgrade the TIS Dashboard Central component, you can use the following command:

helm upgrade central tis/central -n tis --version ${VERSION}

Uninstall TIS Central

To uninstall the TIS Dashboard Central component, you can use the following command:

helm uninstall central -n tis