How to View Metrics in Aeraki Mesh with Prometheus and Grafana

How to View Metrics

Guide: Aeraki Mesh is a CNCF sandbox project that helps you manage any L7 protocol in a service mesh. This tutorial series, co‑hosted by the Cloud Native Community and instructor Zhao Huabing, shows how to use Aeraki to provide L7 traffic routing, local and global rate limiting for Dubbo, Thrift, and other protocols, how to develop a custom protocol with Aeraki Protocol, and how to manage services using that custom protocol in an Istio service mesh. This article introduces how to view metric data.

Install Sample Applications

If you have not installed the sample programs, follow the Quick Start guide (https://www.aeraki.net/zh/docs/v1.0/quickstart/) to install Aeraki, Istio, and the example applications.

After installation you will see two new namespaces in the cluster, each containing a sample program that implements the Dubbo or Thrift protocol via MetaProtocol. You can test with either program.

➜  ~ kubectl get ns|grep meta
meta-dubbo        Active   16m
meta-thrift       Active   16m

Note: Aeraki provides the same metrics for any private protocol built on MetaProtocol.

In the istio-system namespace, Prometheus and Grafana are already installed. Prometheus collects request‑level metric data from the sidecar proxies, which can be queried directly in Prometheus and visualized in Grafana.

➜  ~ kubectl get deploy -n istio-system
NAME                   READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
aeraki                 1/1     1            1           46h
grafana                1/1     1            1           46h
istio-ingressgateway   1/1     1            1           46h
istiod                 1/1     1            1           46h
kiali                  1/1     1            1           46h
prometheus             1/1     1            1           46h

Query Request Metrics via Prometheus

First, use the kubectl port-forward command to forward a local port to the Prometheus service:

kubectl port-forward service/prometheus 9090:9090 -n istio-system

Open a browser at http://127.0.0.1:9090/ and query the metrics. MetaProtocol metrics share a common prefix envoy_meta_protocol_$applicationProtocol ; for example, Dubbo metrics start with envoy_meta_protocol_dubbo and Thrift metrics start with envoy_meta_protocol_thrift .

Query the outbound request metrics for a Dubbo service:

All Dubbo service metrics:

Present Metrics via Grafana Charts

First, forward a local port to the Grafana service:

kubectl port-forward service/grafana 3000:3000 -n istio-system

Import the dashboard JSON file provided by Aeraki into Grafana (see screenshot below):

Open the Aeraki Demo dashboard to view charts for Dubbo and Thrift services, including QPS, latency, success rate, and other metrics.

Next Article

How to modify message headers – stay tuned!

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