I'm having some issues understanding the following.

I'm trying to look up for the "istio_requests_total" metric in Prometheus, using K8s and Istio. But when I go to the Prometheus instance, that metric it's just not there (under Prometheus > Graph > Expression field).

See capture for where it should the metric be and it's not:

So, I have make a lab environment, in which, following the documentation you deploy Prometheus for Istio.

https://istio.io/latest/docs/ops/integrations/prometheus/

And in this environment, the metric "istio_requests_total" is there without having to do anything else.

So I have deep dive into the Prometheus pod created in this demo environment, trying to search from where this metric is configured but didn't have any success yet.

Why am I doing this?

If I'm not wrong, I can use that metric to measure incoming traffic into my services and therefore have a monitoring metric. As I didn't found the metric in my env, I went to create the demo environment to see if I could obtain that configuration and then replicate it into my desired environment

So, my questions in case anybody can shed some light on this are

• From where that metric (and default istio metrics) are configured? Is there any file with those settings?
• Is there any step I have missed?

Have to admin that all of these is fairly new to me, so probably I might doing something wrong. So I'm grateful for any indication on how to approach this.

cheers