istio.io/content/help/faq/distributed-tracing/disabling-tracing.md

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How do I disable tracing?	50

If you already have installed Istio with tracing enabled, you can disable it as follows:

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Fill with the namespace of your istio mesh.Ex: istio-system

TRACING_POD=kubectl get po -n <istio namespace> | grep istio-tracing | awk '{print $1}' $ kubectl delete pod $TRACING_POD -n $ kubectl delete services tracing zipkin -n

Remove reference of zipkin url from mixer deployment

$ kubectl -n istio-system edit deployment istio-telemetry

Now, manually remove instances of trace_zipkin_url from the file and save it.

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Then follow the steps of the cleanup section of the Distributed Tracing task.

If you don’t want tracing functionality at all, then disable tracing when installing Istio.