What is Istio Service Mesh? Let's take a quick look at Istio internals. The Istio architecture can be classified into two distinct planes. Control plane: It consists of the istiod demon, and it manages and configures the envoy proxies to route traffic. The control plane also enforces policies and collects telemetry, and includes components like Pilot for traffic management, Citadel to manage security, and Galley to manage configurations. Data plane: It's made of Envoy proxies deployed as sidecars to our application containers. Envoy is a high-performance, lightweight distributed proxy. It controls all the incoming and outgoing traffic to the container it is attached to. We can use tools like Grafana, Prometheus, Kiali and Zipkin for monitoring and observability as they work well with the telemetry provided by Istio. You can use these or use your existing monitoring stack as well.