My application (hosted in a Kubernetes cluster with Istio installed) does NOT propagate distributed tracing headers (as described here). My expectation is that istio-proxy should still generate a trace (consisting of a single call) that would be visible in Jaeger, even though of course the entire chain of calls would not be stitched together. However, that doesn't appear to be the case, as I'm not seeing any calls to my application in Jaeger.

In attempt to troubleshoot I have tried the following:

• Logs for the istio-proxy container deployed as a side-car to my application's container look good, I can see incoming requests to the application being registered by Envoy:

kubectl logs -f helloworld-69b7f5b6f8-chp9n -c istio-proxy

[2019-01-29T21:29:18.925Z] - 444 289 45 "127.0.0.1:80" inbound|81||helloworld.default.svc.cluster.local 127.0.0.1:45930 10.244.0.54:80 10.244.0.1:33733
[2019-01-29T21:29:29.922Z] - 444 289 25065 "127.0.0.1:80" inbound|81||helloworld.default.svc.cluster.local 127.0.0.1:46014 10.244.0.54:80 10.240.0.5:56166
[2019-01-29T21:30:05.922Z] - 444 289 15051 "127.0.0.1:80" inbound|81||helloworld.default.svc.cluster.local 127.0.0.1:46240 10.244.0.54:80 10.240.0.6:48053
[2019-01-29T21:30:31.922Z] - 444 289 36 "127.0.0.1:80" inbound|81||helloworld.default.svc.cluster.local 127.0.0.1:46392 10.244.0.54:80 10.240.0.6:47009

• I have enabled tracing in Mixer's configuration, and I can now see Mixer's activity in Jaeger UI (but no traces of calls to my application still).

  I'm new to Istio, and it appears I have run out of option.

  First off, is my expectation correct? Am I supposed to be seeing traces - each consisting of a single call - in Jaeger UI when the application doesn't propagate distributed tracing headers?

  If my expectation is correct, how can I troubleshoot further? Can I somehow verify Envoy configuration and check that it's indeed tracing data to Mixer?

  If my expectation is incorrect, can Istio's behavior be overridden so that I get what I need?

  Thank you.