Ceph Dashboard

The dashboard is a very helpful tool to give you an overview of the status of your Ceph cluster, including overall health, status of the mon quorum, status of the mgr, osd, and other Ceph daemons, view pools and PG status, show logs for the daemons, and more. Rook makes it simple to enable the dashboard.

The Ceph dashboard

Enable the Ceph Dashboard

The dashboard can be enabled with settings in the CephCluster CRD. The CephCluster CRD must have the dashboard enabled setting set to true. This is the default setting in the example manifests.

  1.   spec:
  2.     dashboard:
  3.       enabled: true

The Rook operator will enable the ceph-mgr dashboard module. A service object will be created to expose that port inside the Kubernetes cluster. Rook will enable port 8443 for https access.

This example shows that port 8443 was configured.

  1. kubectl -n rook-ceph get service
  2. NAME                         TYPE        CLUSTER-IP       EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)          AGE
  3. rook-ceph-mgr                ClusterIP   10.108.111.192   <none>        9283/TCP         3h
  4. rook-ceph-mgr-dashboard      ClusterIP   10.110.113.240   <none>        8443/TCP         3h

The first service is for reporting the Prometheus metrics, while the latter service is for the dashboard. If you are on a node in the cluster, you will be able to connect to the dashboard by using either the DNS name of the service at https://rook-ceph-mgr-dashboard-https:8443 or by connecting to the cluster IP, in this example at https://10.110.113.240:8443.

IMPORTANT: Please note the dashboard will only be enabled for the first Ceph object store created by Rook.

Login Credentials

After you connect to the dashboard you will need to login for secure access. Rook creates a default user named admin and generates a secret called rook-ceph-dashboard-admin-password in the namespace where the Rook Ceph cluster is running. To retrieve the generated password, you can run the following:

  1. kubectl -n rook-ceph get secret rook-ceph-dashboard-password -o jsonpath="{['data']['password']}" | base64 --decode && echo

Configure the Dashboard

The following dashboard configuration settings are supported:

  1.   spec:
  2.     dashboard:
  3.       urlPrefix: /ceph-dashboard
  4.       port: 8443
  5.       ssl: true
  • urlPrefix If you are accessing the dashboard via a reverse proxy, you may wish to serve it under a URL prefix. To get the dashboard to use hyperlinks that include your prefix, you can set the urlPrefix setting.
  • port The port that the dashboard is served on may be changed from the default using the port setting. The corresponding K8s service exposing the port will automatically be updated.
  • ssl The dashboard may be served without SSL (useful for when you deploy the dashboard behind a proxy already served using SSL) by setting the ssl option to be false.

Viewing the Dashboard External to the Cluster

Commonly you will want to view the dashboard from outside the cluster. For example, on a development machine with the cluster running inside minikube you will want to access the dashboard from the host.

There are several ways to expose a service that will depend on the environment you are running in. You can use an Ingress Controller or other methods for exposing services such as NodePort, LoadBalancer, or ExternalIPs.

Node Port

The simplest way to expose the service in minikube or similar environment is using the NodePort to open a port on the VM that can be accessed by the host. To create a service with the NodePort, save this yaml as dashboard-external-https.yaml.

  1. apiVersion: v1
  2. kind: Service
  3. metadata:
  4.   name: rook-ceph-mgr-dashboard-external-https
  5.   namespace: rook-ceph
  6.   labels:
  7.     app: rook-ceph-mgr
  8.     rook_cluster: rook-ceph
  9. spec:
  10.   ports:
  11.   - name: dashboard
  12.     port: 8443
  13.     protocol: TCP
  14.     targetPort: 8443
  15.   selector:
  16.     app: rook-ceph-mgr
  17.     rook_cluster: rook-ceph
  18.   sessionAffinity: None
  19.   type: NodePort

Now create the service:

  1. kubectl create -f dashboard-external-https.yaml

You will see the new service rook-ceph-mgr-dashboard-external-https created:

  1. $ kubectl -n rook-ceph get service
  2. NAME                                    TYPE        CLUSTER-IP       EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)          AGE
  3. rook-ceph-mgr                           ClusterIP   10.108.111.192   <none>        9283/TCP         4h
  4. rook-ceph-mgr-dashboard                 ClusterIP   10.110.113.240   <none>        8443/TCP         4h
  5. rook-ceph-mgr-dashboard-external-https  NodePort    10.101.209.6     <none>        8443:31176/TCP   4h

In this example, port 31176 will be opened to expose port 8443 from the ceph-mgr pod. Find the ip address of the VM. If using minikube, you can run minikube ip to find the ip address. Now you can enter the URL in your browser such as https://192.168.99.110:31176 and the dashboard will appear.

Load Balancer

If you have a cluster on a cloud provider that supports load balancers, you can create a service that is provisioned with a public hostname. The yaml is the same as dashboard-external-https.yaml except for the following property:

  1. spec:
  2. [...]
  3.   type: LoadBalancer

Now create the service:

  1. kubectl create -f dashboard-loadbalancer.yaml

You will see the new service rook-ceph-mgr-dashboard-loadbalancer created:

  1. $ kubectl -n rook-ceph get service
  2. NAME                                     TYPE           CLUSTER-IP       EXTERNAL-IP                                                               PORT(S)             AGE
  3. rook-ceph-mgr                            ClusterIP      172.30.11.40     <none>                                                                    9283/TCP            4h
  4. rook-ceph-mgr-dashboard                  ClusterIP      172.30.203.185   <none>                                                                    8443/TCP            4h
  5. rook-ceph-mgr-dashboard-loadbalancer     LoadBalancer   172.30.27.242    a7f23e8e2839511e9b7a5122b08f2038-1251669398.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com   8443:32747/TCP      4h

Now you can enter the URL in your browser such as https://a7f23e8e2839511e9b7a5122b08f2038-1251669398.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com:8443 and the dashboard will appear.

Ingress Controller

If you have a cluster with an nginx Ingress Controller and a Certificate Manager (e.g. cert-manager) then you can create an Ingress like the one below. This example achieves four things:

  1. Exposes the dashboard on the Internet (using an reverse proxy)
  2. Issues an valid TLS Certificate for the specified domain name (using ACME)
  3. Tells the reverse proxy that the dashboard itself uses HTTPS
  4. Tells the reverse proxy that the dashboard itself does not have a valid certificate (it is self-signed)
  1. apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
  2. kind: Ingress
  3. metadata:
  4.   name: rook-ceph-mgr-dashboard
  5.   namespace: rook-ceph
  6.   annotations:
  7.     kubernetes.io/ingress.class: "nginx"
  8.     kubernetes.io/tls-acme: "true"
  9.     nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/backend-protocol: "HTTPS"
  10.     nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/server-snippet: |
  11.       proxy_ssl_verify off;
  12. spec:
  13.   tls:
  14.    - hosts:
  15.      - rook-ceph.example.com
  16.      secretName: rook-ceph.example.com
  17.   rules:
  18.   - host: rook-ceph.example.com
  19.     http:
  20.       paths:
  21.       - path: /
  22.         backend:
  23.           serviceName: rook-ceph-mgr-dashboard
  24.           servicePort: https-dashboard

Customise the Ingress resource to match your cluster. Replace the example domain name rook-ceph.example.com with a domain name that will resolve to your Ingress Controller (creating the DNS entry if required).

Now create the Ingress:

  1. kubectl create -f dashboard-ingress-https.yaml

You will see the new Ingress rook-ceph-mgr-dashboard created:

  1. $ kubectl -n rook-ceph get ingress
  2. NAME                      HOSTS                      ADDRESS   PORTS     AGE
  3. rook-ceph-mgr-dashboard   rook-ceph.example.com      80, 443   5m

And the new Secret for the TLS certificate:

  1. $ kubectl -n rook-ceph get secret rook-ceph.example.com
  2. NAME                       TYPE                DATA      AGE
  3. rook-ceph.example.com      kubernetes.io/tls   2         4m

You can now browse to https://rook-ceph.example.com/ to log into the dashboard.