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Enterprise Observability with Tetrate Service Bridge - Advancing from Istio

Objective

Evolving from open-source Istio to enterprise Tetrate Service Bridge (TSB) to deliver unified observability, enhanced security, and simplified operations across multi-cluster service mesh deployments.

Why Enterprise Solution over OSS Observability Stack?

Contrary to the challenges faced in OSS observability, Enterprise solutions like Tetrate Service Bridge eliminate the operational complexity, integration overhead, and support fragmentation of managing multiple open-source tools by providing a unified, production-ready platform with enterprise-grade security, compliance features, professional support, SLAs, and seamless multi-cluster capabilities that reduce total cost of ownership while ensuring reliable observability at scale.

Enterprise Capabilities Gained:

  • Unified Multi-Cluster Management: Centralized visibility and control across hybrid and multi-cloud deployments
  • Cross-Cluster Service Discovery: Centralized service inventory, managing a unified view of services with multi-clusters
  • Advanced Observability: Enterprise-grade monitoring with distributed tracing, live envoy proxy logs streaming, distributed metrics and troubleshooting tools all in single pane of glass.
  • Operational Excellence: Inbuild debugging tool, smoother Day 2 operations.
  • High Availability: Cross-cluster east-west failover and traffic management
  • Validation & Analysis: Built-in configuration validation with Tetrate Config Analyzer.

Advancement Process

Prerequisites - Tools and Access

  • Kubernetes cluster access
  • kubectl configured
  • helm installed (version 3.x)
  • curl and jq utilities

Step 1: Get Tetrate Utility cli tool

# One-line installation (Linux & macOS)
curl -sL https://charts.dl.tetrate.io/public/raw/files/get-tctl.sh | bash

Step 2: Cluster Onboarding - Your First Cluster with Tetrate Service Bridge

Contact Tetrate Support

To obtain your Hosted Tetrate Service Bridge credentials before proceeding.

export TSB_SERVER="https://hmg2cm45oa.mp.cloud.tetrate.com"
export TSB_USERNAME="admin"
export TSB_PASSWORD="admin"
export TSB_ORG="tetrate"

#Single Command Cluster Onboarding:-

kubectl config use-context cluster1
curl -s https://bootstrap.tetr8.io/scripts/tsb-obs-onboard-cluster.sh | bash -s -- --cluster cluster1

Expected Output: 

[INFO] Starting Tetrate cluster onboarding for: cluster1
[SUCCESS] Prerequisites check passed
[SUCCESS] Cluster service account registered
[SUCCESS] Configuration template generated
[SUCCESS] Helm repository updated
[SUCCESS] Tetrate Control Plane installed
[SUCCESS] Tetrate cluster onboarding completed for 'cluster1'

Application Deployment

App - Transaction Portal Services

kubectl config use-context cluster1
curl -sL https://bootstrap.tetr8.io/apps/deploy-app.sh | bash
Refer App for architecture.

Success

You have successfully onboarded your cluster to Tetrate Service Bridge. Visit the host and verify under Clusters option.

Post-Onboarding Analysis: Quantifying the Value Delivered by Tetrate Service Bridge

1. Advanced Observability -

Unlike OSS observability stack where a different applications set like Prometheus, Grafana, Zipkin or Kiali brings operational complexity with limited application experience, Tetrate Service Bridge offers a Single Pane of Glass for-

  • Consolidated Service Inventory Across Multi Clusters
  • End to End Topology View with Multi Cluster Architecture
  • Metrics View with Deployments Subsets spread Across Multiple Clusters
  • End to End Traceability while pushing boundaries with multi cluster
  • Live Logs Stream of application and envoy proxy containers
  • Realtime Inspection of envoy-proxy(sidecars) using proxy tools
  • Troubleshooting scenarios plays
  • Compliance management with audit logs


  • A. Consolidated Service Inventory Across Multi Clusters
    Tetrate Service Bridge provides a unified, centralized service inventory that automatically discovers and catalogs all services across multiple clusters, clouds, and environments, while continuously monitoring service health, collecting real-time metrics, and calculating Application Experience (AppDx) scores to provide comprehensive service performance insights, eliminating the complexity of managing fragmented service registries and providing operators with a single pane of glass for service visibility.

Service Inventory


Leverage the Maximum Observability with Multiple Clusters Onboarded.

Actions :-
- Onboard a new kubernetes cluster using the same steps as followed previouly and mentioned above.
- Deploy app - `curl -sL https://bootstrap.tetr8.io/apps/deploy-app.sh | bash`


  • B. End to End Multi Cluster Topology View
    Tetrate Service Bridge delivers a comprehensive end-to-end topology visualization that maps service dependencies, communication flows, and relationships across all clusters and environments in real-time, enabling operators to instantly understand how services interact across the entire distributed infrastructure and quickly identify bottlenecks or failure points in cross-cluster service calls.

OSS Kiali View - It shows topology for local services and remote discoverable only, no cross cluster end to end view.

kiali

Tetrate Service Bridge View

topology


  • C. Metrics View with Deployments Subsets Spread Across Multiple Clusters
    Tetrate Service Bridge provides unified metrics visualization that aggregates and correlates performance data from deployment subsets (versions, canary releases, blue-green deployments) distributed across multiple clusters, enabling operators to compare subset performance, track rollout success rates, and make informed deployment decisions with complete visibility into how different service versions perform across the entire multi-cluster infrastructure.

metrics


  • D. End to End Traceability while pushing boundaries with multi cluster Tetrate Service Bridge delivers seamless end-to-end distributed tracing that correlates requests across multiple clusters, clouds, and service mesh boundaries, automatically stitching together trace spans with consistent sampling and timing synchronization to provide complete visibility into complex multi-cluster transaction flows that traditional tracing solutions struggle to capture.

traceability


  • E. Live Logs Stream of application and envoy proxy containers Tetrate Service Bridge provides real-time live log streaming from both application containers and Envoy proxy sidecars across all clusters, enabling operators to instantly troubleshoot issues by correlating application behavior with service mesh proxy activities in a unified log view without needing to access individual cluster logging systems.

Logs


  • F. Realtime Inspection of envoy-proxy(sidecars) using proxy tools Tetrate Service Bridge enables real-time inspection and debugging of Envoy proxy sidecars through integrated proxy tools, allowing operators to instantly examine proxy configurations, listener states, cluster health, routing rules, and traffic statistics across all service mesh instances without requiring direct cluster access or complex kubectl commands.

proxytools


2. Compliance Management with Audit Logs

Tetrate Service Bridge provides comprehensive compliance management through centralized audit logging that automatically captures and tracks all service mesh configuration changes, policy enforcement actions, security violations, and administrative activities across multi-cluster environments, ensuring organizations can meet regulatory requirements and maintain detailed audit trails for governance and security compliance.

audit


3. Troubleshooting Scenarios Plays

Tetrate Service Bridge offers guided troubleshooting scenario playbooks that automatically correlate metrics, traces, logs, and topology data to provide step-by-step diagnostic workflows for common service mesh issues, enabling operators to quickly identify root causes and resolve problems like traffic routing failures, security policy violations, or performance degradation across multi-cluster deployments.

troubleshooting


The Result

A fully functional multi-cluster service mesh backed by enterprise-grade monitoring, service discovery capabilities, and simplified management through Tetrate Service Bridge.

Additional Tools and Utilities

Tetrate Config Analyzer

The Tetrate Config Analyzer helps validate and optimize your Istio configurations by analyzing configuration files and live cluster states.

Key Capabilities: - Parses Istio resources and applies rule sets - Generates detailed reports with errors and warnings - Provides recommendations for configuration improvements - Supports both file-based and live cluster analysis

Usage: Examine your deployed Istio configurations and policies for optimization opportunities and potential issues.

Setup: Tetrate Config Analyzer

Next Steps

  1. Explore the TSB Dashboard - Access your unified observability interface
  2. Configure Advanced Policies - Set up traffic management and security policies
  3. Monitor and Troubleshoot - Utilize TSB's advanced observability features
  4. Scale Operations - Expand to additional clusters and environments

Support and Documentation

  • TSB Documentation: docs.tetrate.io
  • Community Support: Contact Tetrate support for assistance
  • Advanced Training: Consider Tetrate's enterprise training programs