Istio's Comprehensive Metrics and Community Engagement

Although the Envoy proxies send trace spans to Zipkin out-of-the-box, to leverage its full potential, applications need to be Zipkin aware and forward some headers to tie the individual spans together. See [zipkin-tracing](https://istio.io/docs/tasks/zipkin-tracing.html) for details. **Holistic view of the entire fleet** The metrics that Istio provides are much more than just a convenience. They provide a consistent view of the service mesh, by generating uniform metrics throughout. We don’t have to worry about reconciling different types of metrics emitted by various runtime agents, or add arbitrary agents to gather metrics for legacy uninstrumented apps. We also no longer have to rely on the development process to properly instrument the application to generate metrics. The service mesh sees all the traffic, even into and out of legacy "black box" services, and generates metrics for all of it. **Summary** The demo above showed how in a few steps, we can launch Istio-backed services and observe L7 metrics on them. Over the next weeks we’ll follow on with demonstration of more Istio capabilities like policy management and HTTP request routing. Google, IBM and Lyft joined forces to create Istio based on our common experiences building and operating large and complex microservice deployments for internal and enterprise customers. Istio is an industry-wide community effort. We’ve been thrilled to see the enthusiasm from the industry partners and the insights they brought. As we take the next step and release Istio to the wild, we cannot wait to see what the broader community of contributors will bring to it. If you’re using or considering to use a microservices architecture on Kubernetes, we encourage you to give Istio a try, learn about it more at [istio.io](http://istio.io/), let us know what you think, or better yet, [**join**](https://istio.io/community/) the developer community to help shape its future! _--On behalf of the Istio team. Frank Budinsky, Software Engineer at IBM, Andra Cismaru, Software Engineer and Israel Shalom, Product Manager at Google._ - Get involved with the Kubernetes project on [GitHub](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes) - Post questions (or answer questions) on [Stack Overflow](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/kubernetes) - Connect with the community on [Slack](http://slack.k8s.io/) - Follow us on Twitter [@Kubernetesio](https://twitter.com/kubernetesio) for latest updates

Istio provides a consistent, uniform view of the service mesh through its generated metrics, eliminating the need to reconcile diverse metrics or instrument legacy applications. This comprehensive approach offers visibility into all traffic, including "black box" services. The provided demo illustrates the ease of launching Istio-backed services and monitoring L7 metrics. Istio, a collaborative effort by Google, IBM, and Lyft, encourages community participation and provides resources for learning, contributing, and staying updated.