Web console

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.3

Read more to learn how to use console components.

Abstract

Read more to learn how to use console components.

Chapter 1. Web console

Learn how to access the console for your Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management console and learn how to use console components.

1.1. Accessing your console

From the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform web console, you can access the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes console. You can also access the console from your terminal after installation. See all the options for accessing your console.

1.1.1. From the OpenShift Container Platform web console

  • You can click the Application launcher in the header and choose the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes option.
  • For earlier versions of OpenShift Container Platform, you can click the Application launcher in the header and choose the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes option.

  • You can also access the console from the left-hand navigation.

    • Click Networking > Routes
    • From the Project menu, select the namespace where Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes is installed. The default namespace is open-cluster-management.
    • Click the multicloud-console URL from the Location column.

1.1.2. From the Red Hat OpenShift CLI:

  1. While logged in to Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and after you install Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, run the following command to find the route. Here, <namespace-from-install> is the namespace where you installed the product: 
  oc get routes -n <namespace-from-install>
  1. Find the open-cluster-management name and the Host/Port columns to get your URL.

Learn more about the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes console, see Web console.

1.2. Console overview

Learn more about console components that you can use to view, manage, or customize your console.

See the following image of the Navigation from the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes console, which is described in more detail later in each section. See that the navigation represents major production function.

Navigation

1.2.1. Console components

To learn about Search, see Search in the console

1.2.2. Home

From the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes Home page, you get more information about the product and you can access header features, as well as the pages for the major components of the product.

  • Access the Welcome page and the Overview, which gives you visibility into your clusters.

    You can view the following information about your clusters on the Overview dashboard:

    • Metric data from your managed clusters by selecting the Grafana link
    • Cluster, node, and pod counts across all clusters and for each provider
    • Cluster status
    • Cluster compliance
    • Pod status

Additionally, you can view many clickable elements on the dashboard open a search for related resources. Click on a provider card to view information for clusters from a single provider.

  • Select Grafana to access the Grafana dashboard.
  • Click Add provider connections to access the Clusters page.

1.2.3. Infrastructure

1.2.4. Applications

Click Create application to edit a .yaml file and create your application. Click Overview and Advanced configuration to view the information of each application. For more information about application resources, see Managing applications.

1.2.5. Governance

Use the Governance dashboard to create and manage policies and policy controllers. Click Create policy to edit a .yaml file and create your application. For more information, see Governance.

1.2.6. Credentials

View your credentials and click Add credential to select and add new cloud provider credentials.

1.2.7. Visual Web Terminal (Technology preview)

Use the Visual Web Terminal to run many commands across your cluster. Run commands and get outputs without leaving the entire console. You can run multiple commands, similar to what you can do in a standard terminal.

1.3. Search in the console

For Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, search provides visibility into your Kubernetes resources across all of your clusters. Search indexes the Kubernetes resources and the relationships to other resources. You can create a searchcustomization custom resource (CR) to define the storage settings for search persistence if you want to change the storage class and storage size.

1.3.1. Search components

The search architecture is composed of the following components:

  • Collector: Watches the Kubernetes resources and creates an index. The search-collector computes relationships for resources within the managed cluster.
  • Aggregator: Receives data from the collector and writes to a database. The search-aggregator watches resources in the hub cluster, computes multicluster relationships, and tracks the activity from connected collectors.
  • Search API: Provides access to the data in the search index and enforces role-based access control.

Search is enabled by default. Search is also enabled when you provision or manually import a managed cluster. If you want to disable search on your managed cluster, see Modifying the klusterlet add-ons settings of your cluster for more information.

1.3.2. Search customization

When you install Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, the product is configured to persist the data in-memory to a file system. The StatefulSet search-redisgraph deploys the Redisgraph pod, which mounts the persistent volume named persist. If your cluster has a defined default storage class, the search component creates a Persistent Volume Claim (PVC) of 10Gi on the default storage class. If a default storage class does not exist in your cluster, search saves the index in an empty directory (emptyDir).

You can customize the storage settings for search by creating the searchcustomization CR. Search customization is namespace-scoped and located where search is installed in the hub cluster. View the following example of the search customization CR: 

apiVersion: search.open-cluster-management.io/v1alpha1
kind: SearchCustomization
metadata:
  name: searchcustomization
  namespace: open-cluster-management
spec:
  persistence: true
  storageClass: gp2
  storageSize: 12Gi

Run the following command to view search customization CRD: 

oc get crd searchcustomizations.search.open-cluster-management.io -o yaml

You can disable persistence by updating the persistence flag to false in the customization CR, which turns off saving search index to the file system. A status for persistence can be retrieved from the search operator (searchoperator) CR. Run the following command to view search operator CR: oc get searchoperator searchoperator -o yaml.

1.3.3. Queries in the console

You can type any text value in the Search box and results include anything with that value from any property, such as a name or namespace. Users are unable to search for values that contain an empty space.

For more specific search results, include the property selector in your search. You can combine related values for the property, for a more precise scope of your search. For example, search for cluster:dev red to receive results that match the string "red" in the dev cluster.

View the following steps to make queries with search:

  1. Click Search in the navigation menu.

  2. Type a word in the Search box, then Search finds your resources that contain that value.

    • As you search for resources, you receive other resources that are related to your original search result, which help you visualize how the resources interact with other resources in the system.
    • Search returns and lists each cluster with the resource that you search. For resources in the hub cluster, the cluster name is displayed as local-cluster.
    • Your search results are grouped by kind, and each resource kind is grouped in a table.

    • Your search options depend on your cluster objects. You can refine your results with specific labels. Search is case-sensitive when you query labels. See the following examples: name, namespace, status, and other resource fields. Auto-complete provides suggestions to refine your search. See the following example:

      • Search for a single field, such as kind:pod to find all pod resources.
      • Search for multiple fields, such as kind:pod namespace:default to find the pods in the default namespace.

    Notes:

    • You can also search with conditions by using characters, such as >, >=, <, <=, !=.

    • When you search for more than one property selector with multiple values, the search returns either of the values that were queried. View the following examples:

      • When you search for kind:pod name:a, any pod named a is returned.
      • When you search for kind:pod name:a,b, any pod named a or b are returned.
      • Search for kind:pod status:!Running to find all pod resources where the status is not Running.
      • Search for kind:pod restarts:>1 to find all pods that restarted at least twice.
  3. If you want to save your search, click the Save search icon.

1.3.3.1. Query ArgoCD applications

When you search for an ArgoCD application, you are directed to the Applications page. Complete the following steps to access the ArgoCD application from the Search page:

  1. Log in to your Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management hub cluster.
  2. From the console header, select the Search icon.
  3. Filter your query with the following values: kind:application and apigroup:argoproj.io
  4. Select an application to view. The Application page displays an overview of information for the application.

Learn more about the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes console, see Web console.

1.4. Visual Web Terminal (Technology preview)

The Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes Visual Web Terminal is a Technology preview feature. You can use the Visual Web Terminal to run many commands across your cluster. Run commands and get outputs without leaving the entire console. You can run multiple commands, similar to what you can do in a standard terminal.

With Visual Web Terminal, commands that return cluster resource data are displayed visually in interactive tabular format, rather than plain text that is displayed in a standard terminal. You can see the data, click on a row, and then see more details about that resource.

By default, Visual Web Terminal includes the versions of the oc, kubectl, helm, and subctl CLI binaries that are equivalent to the latest OpenShift Container Platform version that is supported by Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for the hub cluster.

You can check the versions by running the following commands:

  • oc version
  • kubectl version
  • helm version
  • subctl version

Notes:

The information that is provided in the Visual Web Terminal is limited by the permissions of the user. When you run a command, only the items that you have permission to view are displayed.

If there are over ten sessions that are running at the same time, there might be a slower response time when running commands.

The Visual Web Terminal connects to the cloud that you are already logged into with the hub cluster console.

1.4.1. Starting a session

You can access the Visual Web Terminal by completing the following steps:

  1. Log in to your console.
  2. Access the terminal either from the console navigation where you can open in a new tab, or select Visual Web Terminal icon from the console Header. From the header, choose to open in a new tab or open in a current tab.

1.4.2. Running commands in a session

  1. Start running commands in the input field. For example, you can start running any oc or kubectl commands and get an interactive table of resources.

    Notes:

    • After you run a command in your session and hover your cursor over the command, the following actions are available: Copy, Re-execute this command, and End session
    • When you select a resource in the command results table to see the details, the screen is split. The second screen that appears displays the command that was run to display the details. The details that are included in the split-screen details tabs are Summary, YAML, and others that are associated with the resource type, for example Logs and Terminal.
  2. Optional: Run the command, getting started or select the getting started link to pull up the Getting started page in a new tab on the Visual Web Terminal page. The new tab remains open until you close it.

  3. Optional: You can click the buttons to change the default context and namespace using the pop-up finder panel. By default, the context is the hub cluster and the namespace is the default namespace. After you change the default namespace, the @default namespace is changed until you manually change it again.

    Note: If you have multiple tabs open, you can select a diifferent namespace for every tab so that the commands that you run on that tab default to the namespace you selected. You can search for the namespace that you want to use.

  4. Use the Supported command list to learn about commands that you can run in addition to oc, kubectl, helm, and subctl.

1.4.3. Supported command list

The following table provides information and examples for the command types that are supported by the Visual Web Terminal:

CommandDescriptionExample

!!

Run the previous command again.

!!

bash commands

Run the following basic bash commands: base64, basename, cat, cksum, cp, cut, date, dirname, echo, grep, head, ls, mkdir, mv, printf, readlink, rm, tail, touch, uname, vi, and vim

mkdir new_directory

cd

Change the current working directory within your Visual Web Terminal session. When the session starts, you are given a home directory. You can create files and directories from the home directory, but you are not allowed to access any other directories. The contents of your home directory only exist during the current Visual Web Terminal session. It does not persist after you close the page.

cd dir_name

clear

Clear the screen of previous commands and output.

clear

export

Export the output of the command to an external file.

export search search_criteria

helm

Run supported helm commands. Tip: See the helm commands topic in the Helm documentation for more information about the Helm commands.

helm list --chart-name

help (alias for getting started)

Display additional information about a command that is supported in the Visual Web Terminal on the Getting Started page.

help

history

Displays the previous 20 commands that were run during the current session. Tip: You can limit the search criteria by adding it to the end of the command. For example, history help displays the last 25 commands that contained the string help.

history

kubectl or k

Run supported kubectl (or shorthand k) commands. Tip: See the Kubernetes CLI reference for more information about the kubectl commands.

kubectl get pods

oc

Runs Red Hat OpenShift oc commands. Tip: See Red Hat OpenShift CLI Operations for more information about the oc commands. For example, when you run oc get pods the pods in your cluster are shown as a table view or grid view. The grid is used if there are 25 or more rows displayed. In the case of the grid when you hover over a square, the name of the pod and status are shown. For either the grid or table view, select the grid square or table row to get details about that resource. If you want to change the view from grid to table, select the Table icon at the end of the grid.

oc get svc

search

Searches your Kubernetes resources for those that match the specified search filters and parameters.

search pod

savedsearches

Displays your saved searches that you created and saved in the Search page.

savedsearches Tip: You can specify a string after the savedsearches command to limit the data that is returned. For example, savedsearches projectA displays the saved searches that contain the string projectA.

sleep

Pauses activity during a session. Note: Requires a sleepTime parameter that identifies the number of seconds that it pauses.

sleep 20

themes

Displays a drop-down list of the contrast theme options of the interface, which you can set to either PatternFly4 Light or PatternFly4 Dark.

themes

1.4.4. Searching with Visual Web Terminal

The Visual Web Terminal search function provides visibility into your resources across all your clusters.

You can only search for resources based on your role-based access control level assignment. If you save and share a search query with another user, returned results for that user depend on his or her access level.

  1. Start a Visual Web Terminal session.
  2. In the command entry field of the Visual Web Terminal, type: search. When you run a search command, the Visual Web Terminal verifies that the search function is available. If it is not available, a message indicates that either the search function is not installed, or that it is just not available. If it is installed, but not available, it might be a network issue.
  3. Add a space after the search command. The list of filters that are available for the search is displayed. The list of filters might be empty because it is dependent on the resources that are available in your environment and your role permissions.
  4. Select one of the filters from the list. The selected filter is added to the search criteria on your command line, and the next level of filters for that selection are displayed. Tip: You can also enter a string after the search command, rather than selecting a filter from the list.
  5. Optional: Add filters by entering a single space after each filter entry until your command contains all of the required filters.
  6. When you are finished adding your search criteria, press Enter to run the search.

You can refine your results with specific fields. See the following example:

  • Search for a single field, such as kind:pod to find all pod resources.
  • Search for multiple fields, such as kind:pod namespace:default to find the pods in the default namespace.

You can also search with conditions using characters, such as (>, >=, <, <=, !=).

See the following examples:

  • Search for kind:pod status:!Running to find all pod resources where the status is not Running.
  • Search for kind:pod restarts:>1 to find all pods that have restarted at least twice.

The search returns resources that meet the criteria of your search request, as well as links to view related resources. Viewing all of them helps you visualize how the resources interact with other resources in the system.

Your search results are grouped by kind and each resource kind is grouped in a table. You can reorder the data in the tables by selecting the row and column headings.

You can use a search that was saved in the console by entering the savedsearches command and selecting the search that you want to run.

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