Envoy Statistics

The Envoy proxy keeps detailed statistics about network traffic.

Envoy’s statistics only cover the traffic for a particular Envoy instance. See Observability for persistent per-service Istio telemetry. The statistics the Envoy proxies record can provide more information about specific pod instances.

To see the statistics for a pod:

  1. $ kubectl exec $POD -c istio-proxy -- pilot-agent request GET stats

See the Envoy documentation for an explanation of the data recorded.

By default, Istio configures Envoy to record minimal statistics. The default collection keys are:

  • cluster_manager
  • listener_manager
  • server
  • cluster.xds-grpc

To see the Envoy settings for statistics data collection use istioctl proxy-config bootstrap and follow the deep dive into Envoy configuration. Envoy only collects statistical data on items matching the inclusion_list within the stats_matcher JSON element.

To Configure Envoy to record statistics for inbound or outbound traffic, add the sidecar.istio.io/statsInclusionPrefixes annotation to the pod template in the Kubernetes Deployment. Add the cluster.outbound prefix to gather data about outbound traffic activity and circuit breaking. To gather data on inbound traffic, add the listener prefix. The sample fortio-deploy.yaml shows use of sidecar.istio.io/statsInclusionPrefixes with the cluster.outbound prefix.

You can override the Envoy defaults to gather less data than usual. Use sidecar.istio.io/statsInclusionPrefixes: cluster_manager,listener_manager to collect the least statistics possible.