Kuma 0.4 Released With L7 Tracing + Grafana Dashboards!

We are happy to announce the release of Kuma 0.4! This is a major release focused on significantly better observability capabilities that also includes many new features and improvements across the board.

This release also marks the 10th release of Kuma since September 2019! We are very proud of the release momentum we have executed so far, and we are looking forward to accelerating the delivery of more advanced L7 features within the next few months, as well as more advanced networking support for complex service mesh deployments across hybrid environments.

Notable Features

• A new TrafficTrace policy that allows users to configure tracing on L7 HTTP traffic
• Three official Grafana dashboards to visualize traffic metrics collected by Prometheus
• For Kubernetes, a new selective sidecar injection capability
• For Universal deployments, a new data plane format to better support gateway use cases
• A new protocol tag to support different L7 protocols
• And much more!

For a complete list of features and updates, take a look at the full changelog.

L7 Tracing

Kuma now supports L7 tracing with configurable tracing backends by leveraging the new TrafficTrace policy. It supports Zipkin and Jaeger out of the box, and it allows users to better identify the flow of traffic among our services in order to identify dependencies and bottlenecks in our systems.

Below you can see a Jaeger example after being integrated with Kuma:

Grafana Dashboards

Kuma already allowed the collection of metrics via the TrafficMetric, and now it supports three new official Grafana dashboards that, out of the box, allow you to visualize vital metrics about the service mesh. The dashboards provide:

• Metrics for a single data plane
• Metrics for a single mesh
• Metrics for the service traffic in a mesh You can find the dashboards in the Grafana marketplace. Below, you see an example:

Community Calls + Slack

Join us on our community channels to learn more about Kuma, including our official Slack chat! The community channels are useful to get up and running with Kuma, as well as to learn how to contribute to and discuss the project roadmap.

The next community call will be hosted on July 8 at 8:30am PDT. Also don’t forget to follow Kuma on Twitter!

Upgrading

Be sure to carefully read the Upgrade Guide before upgrading Kuma.