Does Kiali provide a way for servise mesh graph exportation?

Question

I am using Istio with Kiali and i would like to integrate the graph representation with its weights on my own code.

Does Istio or Kiali by itself provide an API for such a purpose? For example to export the graph as a JSON object?

Answer 1

There's no official support for consuming the rest API of Kiali, however you can definitely do that. "No support" means that the API may have breaking changes when you update Kiali, which are not necessarily going to be documented.

Kiali is made of two components, a backend server and a frontend UI, they communicate through a rest api with json data passed to the frontend, so you can call directly the backend endpoint that serves the graph. It's a GET on <kiali url>/api/namespaces/graph

There's a swagger file that documents this API, see here in particular for the graph endpoint: https://github.com/kiali/kiali/blob/master/swagger.json#L559-L651

Answer 2

From this

To this

(cmd)luan@kitty:~/ws/kiali$ python3 main.py 
cartservice -> redis-cart
checkoutservice -> cartservice
checkoutservice -> shippingservice
checkoutservice -> emailservice
checkoutservice -> paymentservice
checkoutservice -> currencyservice
checkoutservice -> productcatalogservice
recommendationservice -> productcatalogservice
frontend -> adservice
frontend -> cartservice
frontend -> checkoutservice
frontend -> recommendationservice
frontend -> shippingservice
frontend -> currencyservice
frontend -> productcatalogservice
loadgenerator -> frontend

I asked the maintainer, and this is the way:

1. From the Kiali UI, click the help icon at the top of the masthead (the circle with the question mark in it) to get a dropdown menu:

2. Click "View Debug Info" found in that dropdown menu.

3. In the popup window that results, select the "Additional State" tab.

At this point, you will see JSON, where the graph (edges and nodes) can be found. The graph data starts at the JSON element "reduxState.graph".

4. Click the "Download" button to download the JSON, which you can then process yourself using whatever tools you want.

You can refer to the original answer of the maintainer here: https://github.com/kiali/kiali/discussions/6211