Istio has quite a number of loggings options which you can turn on. Amon them are admin, client, connection, rbac, dns. You can change the log option for these component by running the following command. Here we are using a sample httpbin pods and setting rbac logging to debug kubectl exec httpbin-847f64cc8d-b7nnq -c istio-proxy -- curl -X POST localhost:15000/logging?rbac=debug -s Please note: Port 15000 is istio admin port. or your can also use istioctl command to do turn on logging level. In this example, we are setting the logging level for all to debug istioctl proxy-config log httpbin-f66f49b6f-jhmmz --level debug. These are the type of logging supported. none error warn info debug The effect is immediate. Right after you run the command, the information level changes.