Consolidate logging in istio-cni

[bleggett]

Describe the feature request

Right now if you want to enable logging for the istio-cni daemonset you might try to supply the following granular logLevel config:

level: default:info,cni:debug

this will only show debug logs for the cni plugin (used by ambient or sidecar) but will not show any logs for the ambient controller, or the CNI plugin (sidecar or ambient) install logic, which are registered as different subcomponents within istio-cni - for that you need (I think):

level: default:info,cni:debug,ambient:debug,install:debug

This is confusing, and nonobvious. We should consider using either a common component name for log signaling for everything in istio-cni (istio-cni maybe), or something a bit smarter.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Affected product area (please put an X in all that apply)

[ ] Ambient
[x] Docs
[ ] Dual Stack
[ ] Installation
[ ] Networking
[ ] Performance and Scalability
[ ] Extensions and Telemetry
[ ] Security
[ ] Test and Release
[ ] User Experience
[ ] Developer Infrastructure

Affected features (please put an X in all that apply)

[ ] Multi Cluster
[ ] Virtual Machine
[ ] Multi Control Plane

Additional context

[howardjohn]

Why not just set all:debug if you want everything?

[bleggett]

Why not just set all:debug if you want everything?

That will work if you explicitly set cni.logLevel directly/by itself yep. And since cni.logLevel currently ignores the global setting, that's fine, but that still results in having to do something like

--set values.cni.logLevel="all:debug" --set values.global.logging.level="all:info"

if you want to configure cni levels independently of other things in Istio.

ideally I'd want cni.logLevel to inherit the global log config, and it cannot as long as we have ☝️

[yas8say]

Hello, a newbie here. Can you guys help me understand this a bit more

[bleggett]

@yas8say Sorry! I ended up fixing this in #51074 myself because I was already working in the area.

TYVM for volunteering!