---

name: service-mesh-observability description: "Complete guide to observability patterns for Istio, Linkerd, and service mesh deployments." risk: critical source: community date_added: "2026-02-27"

Service Mesh Observability

Complete guide to observability patterns for Istio, Linkerd, and service mesh deployments.

Do not use this skill when

• The task is unrelated to service mesh observability
• You need a different domain or tool outside this scope

Instructions

• Clarify goals, constraints, and required inputs.
• Apply relevant best practices and validate outcomes.
• Provide actionable steps and verification.
• If detailed examples are required, open resources/implementation-playbook.md.

Use this skill when

• Setting up distributed tracing across services
• Implementing service mesh metrics and dashboards
• Debugging latency and error issues
• Defining SLOs for service communication
• Visualizing service dependencies
• Troubleshooting mesh connectivity

Core Concepts

1. Three Pillars of Observability

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                  Observability                       │
├─────────────────┬─────────────────┬─────────────────┤
│     Metrics     │     Traces      │      Logs       │
│                 │                 │                 │
│ • Request rate  │ • Span context  │ • Access logs   │
│ • Error rate    │ • Latency       │ • Error details │
│ • Latency P50   │ • Dependencies  │ • Debug info    │
│ • Saturation    │ • Bottlenecks   │ • Audit trail   │
└─────────────────┴─────────────────┴─────────────────┘

2. Golden Signals for Mesh

| Signal | Description | Alert Threshold | |--------|-------------|-----------------| | Latency | Request duration P50, P99 | P99 > 500ms | | Traffic | Requests per second | Anomaly detection | | Errors | 5xx error rate | > 1% | | Saturation | Resource utilization | > 80% |

Templates

Template 1: Istio with Prometheus & Grafana

# Install Prometheus
apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: prometheus
  namespace: istio-system
data:
  prometheus.yml: |
    global:
      scrape_interval: 15s
    scrape_configs:
      - job_name: 'istio-mesh'
        kubernetes_sd_configs:
          - role: endpoints
            namespaces:
              names:
                - istio-system
        relabel_configs:
          - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_service_name]
            action: keep
            regex: istio-telemetry
---
# ServiceMonitor for Prometheus Operator
apiVersion: monitoring.coreos.com/v1
kind: ServiceMonitor
metadata:
  name: istio-mesh
  namespace: istio-system
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: istiod
  endpoints:
    - port: http-monitoring
      interval: 15s

Template 2: Key Istio Metrics Queries

# Request rate by service
sum(rate(istio_requests_total{reporter="destination"}[5m])) by (destination_service_name)

# Error rate (5xx)
sum(rate(istio_requests_total{reporter="destination", response_code=~"5.."}[5m]))
  / sum(rate(istio_requests_total{reporter="destination"}[5m])) * 100

# P99 latency
histogram_quantile(0.99,
  sum(rate(istio_request_duration_milliseconds_bucket{reporter="destination"}[5m]))
  by (le, destination_service_name))

# TCP connections
sum(istio_tcp_connections_opened_total{reporter="destination"}) by (destination_service_name)

# Request size
histogram_quantile(0.99,
  sum(rate(istio_request_bytes_bucket{reporter="destination"}[5m]))
  by (le, destination_service_name))

Template 3: Jaeger Distributed Tracing

# Jaeger installation for Istio
apiVersion: install.istio.io/v1alpha1
kind: IstioOperator
spec:
  meshConfig:
    enableTracing: true
    defaultConfig:
      tracing:
        sampling: 100.0  # 100% in dev, lower in prod
        zipkin:
          address: jaeger-collector.istio-system:9411
---
# Jaeger deployment
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: jaeger
  namespace: istio-system
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: jaeger
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: jaeger
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: jaeger
          image: jaegertracing/all-in-one:1.50
          ports:
            - containerPort: 5775   # UDP
            - containerPort: 6831   # Thrift
            - containerPort: 6832   # Thrift
            - containerPort: 5778   # Config
            - containerPort: 16686  # UI
            - containerPort: 14268  # HTTP
            - containerPort: 14250  # gRPC
            - containerPort: 9411   # Zipkin
          env:
            - name: COLLECTOR_ZIPKIN_HOST_PORT
              value: ":9411"

Template 4: Linkerd Viz Dashboard

# Install Linkerd viz extension
linkerd viz install | kubectl apply -f -

# Access dashboard
linkerd viz dashboard

# CLI commands for observability
# Top requests
linkerd viz top deploy/my-app

# Per-route metrics
linkerd viz routes deploy/my-app --to deploy