istio-1.7.2 installation, missing dashboards and pods?

Question

I have installed istio using the official reference as on Getting Started page.
Below are the commands i used:
$ curl -L https://istio.io/downloadIstio | sh -

$ istioctl install --set profile=demo

$ kubectl label namespace default istio-injection=enabled

I ended up with below version of istio:

$ istioctl version
client version: 1.7.2
control plane version: 1.7.2
data plane version: 1.7.2 (2 proxies)

and my kubernetes version is:

$ kubectl version --short
Client Version: v1.18.8
Server Version: v1.18.8

Every thing seems fine until i verify the objects installed in istio-system namespace

$ kubectl -n istio-system get all
NAME                                        READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
pod/istio-egressgateway-fbb7dc4f4-qzlxp     1/1     Running   0          84m
pod/istio-ingressgateway-5f84fcdd69-jnmqz   1/1     Running   0          84m
pod/istiod-77df9b78f8-r6n5t                 1/1     Running   0          86m

NAME                           TYPE           CLUSTER-IP       EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)                                                                      AGE
service/istio-egressgateway    ClusterIP      10.111.110.194   <none>        80/TCP,443/TCP,15443/TCP                                                     84m
service/istio-ingressgateway   LoadBalancer   10.97.41.146     <pending>     15021:30194/TCP,80:31161/TCP,443:32397/TCP,31400:31865/TCP,15443:30756/TCP   84m
service/istiod                 ClusterIP      10.107.118.172   <none>        15010/TCP,15012/TCP,443/TCP,15014/TCP,853/TCP                                86m

NAME                                   READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
deployment.apps/istio-egressgateway    1/1     1            1           84m
deployment.apps/istio-ingressgateway   1/1     1            1           84m
deployment.apps/istiod                 1/1     1            1           86m

NAME                                              DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   AGE
replicaset.apps/istio-egressgateway-fbb7dc4f4     1         1         1       84m
replicaset.apps/istio-ingressgateway-5f84fcdd69   1         1         1       84m
replicaset.apps/istiod-77df9b78f8                 1         1         1       86m

As, you can see there are few missing components - There are few pods missing istio-citadel, istio-pilot, istio-policy, istio-sidecar, istio-telemetry, istio-tracing etc. These components were available in 1.4.2.
In 1.4.2 installation I could see grafana, jaeger, kiali, prometheus, zipkin dashboards. But these are now missing . Example:

istioctl dashboard zipkin
Error: no Zipkin pods found

Is this expected behaviour in 1.7.2 or is my installation broken. If the installation is broken, how else can i fix it. After all I followed the instruction from the Starter Guide.

Answer 1

As, you can see there are few missing components - There are few pods missing istio-citadel, istio-pilot, istio-policy, istio-sidecar, istio-telemetry, istio-tracing etc. These components were available in 1.4.2.

These components where merged with version 1.5 into one service named istiod . See: https://istio.io/latest/blog/2020/istiod/

In 1.4.2 installation I could see grafana, jaeger, kiali, prometheus, zipkin dashboards. But these are now missing.

These AddonComponents must be installed manually and are not part of istioctl since version 1.7. See: https://istio.io/latest/blog/2020/addon-rework/

So your installation is not broken. It's just a lot has changed since 1.4. I would suggest to go through the release announcements to read about all changes: https://istio.io/latest/news/releases/