Istio injected rich telemetry for free via Envoy sidecars. But metrics are only useful if you collect and act on them.
Our setup:
- Istio’s Prometheus scraping enabled via Helm
- Custom Grafana dashboards for service latency, error rates
- Alertmanager thresholds for SLO violations
The benefit? Observability with zero application code changes.
Service meshes like Istio abstracted away many cross-cutting concerns — but came with a learning curve.