Visibility is critical for any service mesh. The visibility feature of Linkerd is simple and easy to use, as we will see in this chapter. Linkerd's service mesh is targeted mainly toward the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team or operators of enterprise customers.
In this chapter, we will gain an in-depth insight into the Linkerd service mesh. To do this, we will use three methods, including CLI, the GUI dashboard, and the Prometheus/Grafana dashboard. These dashboards show the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which are easy to understand and provide us with the ability to determine issues/problems and potential bottlenecks besides the visual representation of aggregated data.
In a nutshell, we will cover the following topics:
- Gaining insight into the service mesh
- External Prometheus integration
- Cleaning up