Chapter 10. Dashboard Installation
10.1. Dashboard Service Overview
The Dashboard service provides a graphical user interface for end users and administrators, allowing operations such as creating and launching instances, managing networking, and setting access controls. Its modular design allows interfacing with other products such as billing, monitoring, and additional management tools. The service provides three basic dashboards: user, system, and settings.
The following screen capture displays a user's dashboard after OpenStack is first installed:
The identity of the logged-in user determines the dashboards and panels that are visible in the dashboard.
Table 10.1. Dashboard service components
| Component | Description |
|---|---|
|
openstack-dashboard
|
A Django (Python) web application, provides access to the dashboard using any web browser.
|
|
An Apache HTTP server (
httpd service)
|
Hosts the application.
|
The following diagram provides an overview of the dashboard architecture, where the dashboard service interacts with the OpenStack Identity service for authentication and authorization, the session backend for database services, the httpd service for hosting the application and all the other OpenStack services for API calls.
