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Web console overview | Web console | OKD 4
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Web Console Overview

The Red Hat OKD 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.

Starting with OKD 4.19, the perspectives in the web console have unified. The Developer perspective is no longer enabled by default.

All users can interact with all OKD web console features. However, if you are not the cluster owner, you might need to request permission to certain features from the cluster owner.

You can still enable the Developer perspective. On the Getting Started pane in the web console, you can take a tour of the console, find information on setting up your cluster, view a quick start for enabling the Developer perspective, and follow links to explore new features and capabilities.

You can create quick start tutorials for OKD that provide guided steps within the web console with user tasks. They are helpful for getting oriented with an application, Operator, or other product offering.

Administrator role in the web console

The cluster administrator role 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 use all features in the web console.

Cluster administrators can also open an embedded command-line terminal instance with the web terminal Operator in OKD 4.7 and later.

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 OperatorHub.

  • 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.

Developer role in the web console

The developer role in the web console offers several built-in ways to deploy applications, services, and databases. With the developer role, 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 OKD 4.7 and later.

Developers have access to workflows specific to their use cases, such as the ability to:

  • Create and deploy applications on OKD 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.

Enabling the Developer perspective in the web console

Starting with OKD 4.19, the perspectives in the web console have unified. There is no longer a Developer perspective by default; however, cluster administrators can enable the Developer perspective for developers to use.

You can enable the Developer perspective with the following steps:

Prerequisites

  • You have access to the web console as a user with cluster-admin privileges.

Procedure

  1. Navigate to the Cluster Settings page by clicking Administration → Cluster Settings.

  2. Select the Configuration tab on the Cluster Settings page.

  3. Type console in the search to locate the Console Operator resource and select operator.openshift.io.

  4. On the Cluster Details page, click the Actions menu and select Customize.

  5. In the General tab, locate the Perspectives section. You can enable or disable the Developer perspective as needed. Changes are automatically applied.

  6. Optional: You can enable the Developer perspective with the CLI by running the following command:

    $ oc patch console.operator.openshift.io/cluster --type='merge' -p '{"spec":{"customization":{"perspectives":[{"id":"dev","visibility":{"state":"Enabled"}}]}}}'

    It will take some time for the change to reflect in the web console as the console pod restarts.
Additional resources