Native sidecars (Istio / Envoy) not visible in Application Monitoring mode

mailvk23 — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 06:42:38 GMT

In Dynatrace Kubernetes Application Monitoring mode, native sidecars are not appearing under the containers list in the latest Explorer UI.

Background

In our setup, Istio runs envoy / istio-proxy as native sidecars (initContainers with restartPolicy: Always), which is the newer model promoted by Istio instead of the legacy injected sidecar approach.

However:

In the latest Dynatrace Explorer UI, these istio-proxy containers are not visible.
This gives the impression that native sidecars are ignored — at least from an infrastructure/container visibility perspective (not necessarily deep code monitoring).

Observations

The behavior seems consistent across:

Application Monitoring mode
CloudNativeFullStack mode ( latest explorer window )

In Explorer Classic, running init containers were previously listed when clicking on containers in a pod, but this is no longer the case in the latest UI.
Legacy sidecars (regular containers) appear normally.

Questions

Is this an expected limitation of Dynatrace with Kubernetes native sidecars?
Do understand , there could be limitations on DT side to inject on init conatiners, but how kuberenetes platform monitoring is missing it ?
Is there any roadmap or workaround to get visibility at least on the infra/container level?

Currently thinking about relying on external metrics sources (Prometheus / node-exporter / Istio metrics) ingested into Dynatrace to track native sidecar resource usage instead.

Would appreciate if anyone has experience dealing with native sidecars or initcontainers+ Dynatrace visibility.

topic Native sidecars (Istio / Envoy) not visible in Application Monitoring mode in Container platforms

Native sidecars (Istio / Envoy) not visible in Application Monitoring mode