Chapter 1. Web Console Overview
The Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform web console provides a graphical user interface to visualize your project data and perform administrative, management, and troubleshooting tasks. The web console runs as pods on the control plane nodes in the openshift-console project. It is managed by a console-operator pod. Both Administrator and Developer perspectives are supported.
Both Administrator and Developer perspectives enable you to create quick start tutorials for OpenShift Container Platform. A quick start is a guided tutorial with user tasks and is useful for getting oriented with an application, Operator, or other product offering.
1.1. About the Administrator perspective in the web console
The Administrator perspective enables you to view the cluster inventory, capacity, general and specific utilization information, and the stream of important events, all of which help you to simplify planning and troubleshooting tasks. Both project administrators and cluster administrators can view the Administrator perspective.
Cluster administrators can also open an embedded command line terminal instance with the web terminal Operator in OpenShift Container Platform 4.7 and later.
The default web console perspective that is shown depends on the role of the user. The Administrator perspective is displayed by default if the user is recognized as an administrator.
The Administrator perspective provides workflows specific to administrator use cases, such as the ability to:
- Manage workload, storage, networking, and cluster settings.
- Install and manage Operators using the Operator Hub.
- Add identity providers that allow users to log in and manage user access through roles and role bindings.
- View and manage a variety of advanced settings such as cluster updates, partial cluster updates, cluster Operators, custom resource definitions (CRDs), role bindings, and resource quotas.
- Access and manage monitoring features such as metrics, alerts, and monitoring dashboards.
- View and manage logging, metrics, and high-status information about the cluster.
- Visually interact with applications, components, and services associated with the Administrator perspective in OpenShift Container Platform.
1.2. About the Developer perspective in the web console
The Developer perspective offers several built-in ways to deploy applications, services, and databases. In the Developer perspective, you can:
- View real-time visualization of rolling and recreating rollouts on the component.
- View the application status, resource utilization, project event streaming, and quota consumption.
- Share your project with others.
- Troubleshoot problems with your applications by running Prometheus Query Language (PromQL) queries on your project and examining the metrics visualized on a plot. The metrics provide information about the state of a cluster and any user-defined workloads that you are monitoring.
Cluster administrators can also open an embedded command line terminal instance in the web console in OpenShift Container Platform 4.7 and later.
The default web console perspective that is shown depends on the role of the user. The Developer perspective is displayed by default if the user is recognised as a developer.
The Developer perspective provides workflows specific to developer use cases, such as the ability to:
- Create and deploy applications on OpenShift Container Platform by importing existing codebases, images, and container files.
- Visually interact with applications, components, and services associated with them within a project and monitor their deployment and build status.
- Group components within an application and connect the components within and across applications.
- Integrate serverless capabilities (Technology Preview).
- Create workspaces to edit your application code using Eclipse Che.
You can use the Topology view to display applications, components, and workloads of your project. If you have no workloads in the project, the Topology view will show some links to create or import them. You can also use the Quick Search to import components directly.
Additional Resources
See Viewing application composition using the Topology view for more information on using the Topology view in Developer perspective.
1.3. Accessing the Perspectives
You can access the Administrator and Developer perspective from the web console as follows:
Prerequisites
To access a perspective, ensure that you have logged in to the web console. Your default perspective is automatically determined by the permission of the users. The Administrator perspective is selected for users with access to all projects, while the Developer perspective is selected for users with limited access to their own projects
Additional Resources
See Adding User Preferences for more information on changing perspectives.
Procedure
- Use the perspective switcher to switch to the Administrator or Developer perspective.
- Select an existing project from the Project drop-down list. You can also create a new project from this dropdown.
You can use the perspective switcher only as cluster-admin.
Additional resources
- Learn more about Cluster Administrator
- Overview of the Administrator perspective
- Creating and deploying applications on OpenShift Container Platform using the Developer perspective
- Viewing the applications in your project, verifying their deployment status, and interacting with them in the Topology view
- Viewing cluster information
- Configuring the web console
- Customizing the web console
- Using the web terminal
- Creating quick start tutorials
- Disabling the web console
