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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.

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[...]
spec:
  dashboard:
    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.

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

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-password in the namespace where the Rook Ceph cluster is running. To retrieve the generated password, you can run the following:

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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:

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spec:
  dashboard:
    urlPrefix: /ceph-dashboard
    port: 8443
    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.

Visualization of 'Physical Disks' section in the dashboard

Information about physical disks is available only in Rook host clusters.

The Rook manager module is required by the dashboard to obtain the information about physical disks, but it is disabled by default. Before it is enabled, the dashboard 'Physical Disks' section will show an error message.

To prepare the Rook manager module to be used in the dashboard, modify your Ceph Cluster CRD:

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  mgr:
    modules:
      - name: rook
        enabled: true

And apply the changes:

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$ kubectl apply -f cluster.yaml

Once the Rook manager module is enabled as the orchestrator backend, there are two settings required for showing disk information:

  • ROOK_ENABLE_DISCOVERY_DAEMON: Set to true to provide the dashboard the information about physical disks. The default is false.
  • ROOK_DISCOVER_DEVICES_INTERVAL: The interval for changes to be refreshed in the set of physical disks in the cluster. The default is 60 minutes.

Modify the operator.yaml, and apply the changes:

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$ kubectl apply -f operator.yaml

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.

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apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: rook-ceph-mgr-dashboard-external-https
  namespace: rook-ceph
  labels:
    app: rook-ceph-mgr
    rook_cluster: rook-ceph
spec:
  ports:
  - name: dashboard
    port: 8443
    protocol: TCP
    targetPort: 8443
  selector:
    app: rook-ceph-mgr
    rook_cluster: rook-ceph
  sessionAffinity: None
  type: NodePort

Now create the service:

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kubectl create -f dashboard-external-https.yaml

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

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

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spec:
[...]
  type: LoadBalancer

Now create the service:

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kubectl create -f dashboard-loadbalancer.yaml

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

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$ kubectl -n rook-ceph get service
NAME                                     TYPE           CLUSTER-IP       EXTERNAL-IP                                                               PORT(S)             AGE
rook-ceph-mgr                            ClusterIP      172.30.11.40     <none>                                                                    9283/TCP            4h
rook-ceph-mgr-dashboard                  ClusterIP      172.30.203.185   <none>                                                                    8443/TCP            4h
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)
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apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: rook-ceph-mgr-dashboard
  namespace: rook-ceph
  annotations:
    kubernetes.io/tls-acme: "true"
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/backend-protocol: "HTTPS"
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/server-snippet: |
      proxy_ssl_verify off;
spec:
  ingressClassName: "nginx"
  tls:
   - hosts:
     - rook-ceph.example.com
     secretName: rook-ceph.example.com
  rules:
  - host: rook-ceph.example.com
    http:
      paths:
      - path: /
        pathType: Prefix
        backend:
          service:
            name: rook-ceph-mgr-dashboard
            port:
              name: 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:

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kubectl create -f dashboard-ingress-https.yaml

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

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

And the new Secret for the TLS certificate:

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

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