GKE Mesh

Module: GKE Mesh

Module flag: gke_mesh Enabled by default: yes

---

Overview

The GKE Mesh module surfaces service-to-service traffic topology from Istio or Anthos Service Mesh (ASM) telemetry. It infers edges between services based on actual observed traffic rather than configuration intent.

---

Enable This Module

GCP_PROJECT_ID=my-project ./aura-tracker-gcp --modules gke_mesh

---

Required GCP APIs

gcloud services enable container.googleapis.com monitoring.googleapis.com

---

Required IAM Permissions

Role	Tools that need it
roles/container.viewer	Cluster and workload context
roles/monitoring.viewer	Istio telemetry metrics

---

Tools

gcp_gke_get_mesh_topology

Returns service-to-service traffic edges inferred from Istio/ASM telemetry metrics.

Parameters:

Name	Required	Description
project_id	yes	GCP project ID
location	yes	Region or zone of the GKE cluster
cluster_name	yes	Cluster name
namespace	no	Filter to a specific namespace
hours	no	Lookback window in hours (default: 1)

Returns: Directed edges between services (source → destination), request rates, error rates, P50/P99 latency. Services with no traffic in the window are omitted.

Note: Requires Istio or ASM to be installed and emitting telemetry to Cloud Monitoring. If mesh telemetry is not available, the tool returns an empty edge set.

---

Prompt Examples

Traffic map

"Show me the service-to-service traffic topology for cluster prod-cluster in us-central1 over the last hour."

Error path tracing

"Which services in the checkout namespace of prod-cluster are receiving error responses from their upstream dependencies?"

Latency hotspot

"Which service-to-service calls in prod-cluster have P99 latency above 500ms?"

---

Related Modules

Module flag	Why you'd combine it
gke_workloads	Match traffic edges to Kubernetes workload specs
archgraph	Include mesh topology in the full project architecture graph
monitoring	Fetch raw Istio metrics by metric descriptor