Default Metrics

This page presents details about the metrics that Istio collects when using its initial configuration. You can add and remove metrics by changing configuration at any time, but this is the built-in set. They can be found here under the section with “kind: metric”. It uses metric template to define these metrics.

We will describe metrics first and then the labels for each metric.

Metrics

Request Count: This is a COUNTER metric incremented for every request handled by an Istio proxy.
Request Duration: This is a DISTRIBUTION metric which measures the duration of the request (as observed by the server-side proxy).
Request Size: This is a DISTRIBUTION metric which measures the size of the HTTP request’s body size.
Response Size: This is a DISTRIBUTION metric which measures the size of the HTTP response body size.
Tcp Byte Sent: This is a COUNTER metric which measures the size of total bytes sent during response in case of a TCP connection as measured by the server-side proxy.
Tcp Byte Received: This is a COUNTER metric which measures the size of total bytes received during request in case of a TCP connection as measured by the server-side proxy.

Labels

Source Service: This identifies the source service responsible for an incoming request. This is also the FQDN for a source service. Ex: “reviews.default.svc.cluster.local”.
```
source_service: source.service | "unknown"
```
Source Version: This identifies the version of the source service of the request.
```
source_version: source.labels["version"] | "unknown"
```
Destination Service: This identifies the destination service responsible for an incoming request. This is also the FQDN for a source service. Ex: “details.default.svc.cluster.local”.
```
destination_service: destination.service | "unknown"
```
Destination Version: This identifies the version of the source service of the request.
```
destination_version: destination.labels["version"] | "unknown"
```
Response Code: This identifies the response code of the request. This label is present only on HTTP metrics.
```
response_code: response.code | 200
```
Connection mTLS: This identifies the service authentication policy of the request. It is set to true, when istio is used to make secure communications.
```
connection_mtls: connection.mtls | false
```