Kuma is an open-source control plane for service mesh that simplifies the collection of observability metrics across diverse cloud services and Kubernetes clusters. It integrates with Prometheus and Grafana for traffic metrics and performance monitoring, allowing users to quickly set up metrics collection through automatic service discovery. Additionally, Kuma supports integrations with tools like Splunk, Logstash, and tracing systems such as Jaeger and Zipkin, enabling comprehensive monitoring and troubleshooting of microservice behavior. Users can enhance their service consumption within the mesh using Kong Ingress Controller, which offers features like authentication and rate limiting. Kuma's universal design allows for automatic deployment of sidecar proxies in Kubernetes, supporting a seamless experience across various deployment environments. The tutorial emphasizes the benefits of automating service mesh observability with Kuma, highlighting its capacity to reduce costs, particularly through client-side load balancing in Kong Mesh, which has led to significant savings for some users.