I'm running the bookinfo project from Istio's sample projects on a K8s cluster running on EKS. I have enabled automatic sidecar container injection and deployed the project. There's an external service for googleapis that i enabled following this post.

The service is working as expected, however when checking on Kiali i don't see the external service but a BlackHoleCluster instead. I've read that this is a virtual cluster by Istio for requests to external services that are not in mesh (ServiceEntry adds them in mesh).

I've tried some other samples as well and everything ends up in that BlackHoleCluster (or PassThroughCluster when ALLOW_ALL is enabled for external traffic) so i'm suspecting there's something wrong with Istio's configuration. I'm using Istio 1.5.

I can't really find any help about this. Everyone suggests that a ServiceEntry should be enough.

UPDATE: code example

apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: ServiceEntry
metadata:
  name: httpbin
spec:
  hosts:
    - httpbin.org
  ports:
    - number: 80
      name: http
      protocol: http
    - number: 443
      name: https
      protocol: https
  resolution: DNS
  location: MESH_EXTERNAL