🚀 Kiali: Basic Auth support

[UMMAN2005]

Workspace

kiali

🔖 Feature description

I would like to request support for Basic Authentication (username/password) when configuring the Kiali plugin connection in app-config.yaml.

Currently, the Kiali plugin documentation and implementation appear to only support two authentication strategies:

• anonymous
• token (Service Account token)

I propose adding a basic method that allows defining a username and password (or a base64 encoded string) that the Backstage backend will use to authenticate requests against the Kiali endpoint.

🎤 Context

Many organizations secure their observability dashboards (Kiali, Jaeger, Prometheus) at the Ingress or Gateway level rather than relying on the tool's internal authentication.

For example, a common pattern in Kubernetes is:

1. Ingress/Gateway: NGINX Ingress auth-type: basic or an Istio EnvoyFilter handling Basic Auth.
2. Kiali Pod: Running in anonymous mode (trusting the Gateway) or standard mode.

In this scenario, before the request even reaches Kiali, the ingress controller rejects it with a 401 Unauthorized if the Authorization: Basic <credentials> header is missing.

Since the current Kiali plugin only supports token (Bearer) or anonymous (No header), it is impossible to integrate Backstage with a Kiali instance protected by an Ingress-level Basic Auth policy.

✌️ Possible Implementation

No response

👀 Have you spent some time to check if this feature request has been raised before?

• I checked and didn't find similar issue

🏢 Have you read the Code of Conduct?

• I have read the Code of Conduct

Are you willing to submit PR?

No, I don't have time to work on this right now