Quick Start

Installing Kiali for demo or evaluation.

Run Kiali locally

Kiali can be run directly on your machine without being installed into a Kubernetes cluster. It uses your kubeconfig to connect to your cluster(s). If needed, it can port-forward into the cluster to connect to your external services (prometheus, tracing, istio, grafana).

Running Kiali locally is currently experimental. Functionality may change between releases.

Download the Kiali binary from the Kiali GitHub releases page for your OS and Arch.

Start Kiali which runs the backend server on localhost and opens your default browser to the Kiali UI.

kiali run

To see the full list of options

kiali run --help

If the cluster name in your kubeconfig does not match the cluster name in Istio you can override this with --cluster-name-overrides kubeconfig-name=istio-cluster-name. The flag is a comma separated list so you can override as many names as you need.

Install Kiali

You can quickly install Kiali into your cluster via one of the following two methods.

These instructions are not recommended for production environments. Find more detailed information on installing Kiali, see the installation guide.

Before you install Kiali you must have already installed Istio along with its telemetry storage addon (i.e. Prometheus). You might also consider installing Istio’s optional tracing addon (i.e. Jaeger) and optional Grafana addon but those are not required by Kiali. Refer to the Istio documentation for details.

Install via Istio Addons

If you downloaded Istio, the easiest way to install and try Kiali is by running:

kubectl apply -f ${ISTIO_HOME}/samples/addons/kiali.yaml

To uninstall:

kubectl delete -f ${ISTIO_HOME}/samples/addons/kiali.yaml --ignore-not-found

Install via Helm

Only Helm v3 has been tested. Previous Helm versions may or may not work.

To install the latest version of Kiali Server using Helm, run the following command:

helm install \
  --namespace istio-system \
  --set auth.strategy="anonymous" \
  --repo https://kiali.org/helm-charts \
  kiali-server \
  kiali-server

If you get a validation error, you may have to pass the option --disable-openapi-validation (this is needed on some versions of OpenShift, for example).

To uninstall:

helm uninstall --namespace istio-system kiali-server

Access to the UI

Run the following command:

kubectl port-forward svc/kiali 20001:20001 -n istio-system

Then, access Kiali by visiting https://localhost:20001/ in your preferred web browser.

Last modified August 27, 2025: Add local mode to quickstart (#903) (a862e84)