Workload Entry graph nodes display only "latest" version

[nrfox]

Describe the bug
When a WorkloadEntry generated from istioctl workload entry configure ... appears on the graph, the version displayed is always "latest" despite properly labeling the WorkloadGroup and WorkloadEntry objects with e.g. version: v1.

Versions used
Kiali: 1.36
Istio: 1.10
Kubernetes flavour and version: 1.21

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Add a WorkloadEntry VM to the mesh with a version label and send traffic to it
2. Navigate to the graph and observe the node with "latest" as its version.

Expected behavior
Expected to see the graph node for the WorkloadEntry workload to display the proper version.

Note telemetry has the wrong source_canonical_revision="latest" label but the right version="v1" label.

The cause for this seems to be that when the workload entry VM files are created with istioctl workload entry configure, the "service.istio.io/canonical-version" label gets generated but not the "service.istio.io/canonical-revision" label.

mesh.yaml

...
ISTIO_METAJSON_LABELS: '{"app":"ratings","service.istio.io/canonical-name":"ratings","service.istio.io/canonical-version":"v1","version":"v1"}'

This may be more of an upstream issue but I wanted to post the workaround here in case others run into this same issue.

Workaround
A workaround is to add the "service.istio.io/canonical-revision" to your WorkloadGroup/WorkloadEntry objects

apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: WorkloadGroup
metadata:
  name: details-v1
  namespace: bookinfo
spec:
  metadata:
    labels:
      app: details
      version: v1
      service.istio.io/canonical-revision: v1

It might be possible for Kiali to use both source_canonical_revision and service_istio_io_canonical_revision as service_istio_io_canonical_revision is correctly labeled with the right version?

[jshaughn]

To me this seems like an Istio reporting bug and not a Kiali bug. The canonical_revision should not be "latest" when there is a version label set to "v1". The canonical_revision should be set to the value of, in this order of preference:

service.istio.io/canonical-revision
app.kubernetes.io/version
version
"latest"

Maybe @bianpengyuan has some input here?

If the workaround works that's a good alternative until the issue is resolved. I'm going to label this waiting-external until we know what Istio says about this...

[jshaughn]

This is waiting on an Istio fix: istio/istio#34395. When we get the fix we can re-test and likely close this issue.

[jshaughn]

Istio fix has been merged. This can be tested against Istio 1.12 when a build is available.

[nrfox]

Confirmed that this is fixed when using istio 1.12-beta.2. This issue can either be closed now or after 1.12 GA has been released.

[jshaughn]

This is fixed in Istio 1.12, it is not a Kiali issue.