KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2026

When timelines are tight or infrastructure is isolated, setting up complex observability suites can be a bottleneck. However, a service mesh like Istio, backed by Envoy, already provides a goldmine of data. Drawing from experience in restricted, air-gapped environments, we demonstrate how to turn Envoy and Istio into primary telemetry sources to build a reliable pipeline using Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry (OTel). We will break down essential Istio and Envoy metrics—such as request totals, bytes, and duration—and demystify their rich labels. Attendees will learn to leverage these metrics for "Golden Signal" dashboards, SLOs, and meaningful alerts, without manual per-service configuration. We also cover setting up OTel-based pipelines for Envoy access logs. Finally, we address "day 2" operations: using Prometheus relabeling to reduce cardinality, managing log verbosity via the Istio Telemetry API, and determining when to use synthetic probers over standard metrics.