K8dash is a dashboard for monitoring and managing Kubernetes clusters. It heavily utilizes metrics server to quickly and easily visualize the health of nodes and pods. K8dash also utilizes the streaming apis provided by Kubernetes to update cluster state and metrics in real time. No need to refresh pages to monitor status updates.

Why might you want to use k8dash instead of the default Kubernetes dashboard?

Streaming updates. No need to refresh pages to see latest status
Full OpenID integration out-of-the-box. No need to configure an authenticating proxy to sit in front.
Interates with metrics-server to display realtime metrics

Workloads View

Realtime streaming of status

Notice how the UI automatically reflects changes to the cluster in realtime after scaling a deployment

Prerequisites

A running Kubernetes cluster
metrics server installed (optional, but strongly recommended)
A Kubernetes cluster configured for OpenId Connect authentication (optional)

Getting Started

Deploy k8dash with something like the following...

NOTE: never trust a file downloaded from the internet. Make sure to review the contents of kubernetes-k8dash.yaml before running the script below.

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/herbrandson/k8dash/kubernetes-k8dash.yaml

To access k8dash from your local workstation you must create a secure channel to your Kubernetes cluster. Run the following command:

kubectl proxy

You can then access the ui at http://localhost:8001/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/http:k8dash:/proxy/

Alternatively, if you have an ingress server setup, you can simply add a route like the following

kind: Ingress
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
metadata:
  name: k8dash
  namespace: kube-system
spec:
  rules:
  -
    host: k8dash.example.com
    http:
      paths:
      -
        path: /
        backend:
          serviceName: k8dash
          servicePort: 80

Logging in

There are multiple options logging into the dashboard.

Service Account Token

The first (and easiest) option is to create a dedicated service account. The can be accomplished using the following script.

# Create the service account in the current namespace (we assume default)
kubectl create serviceaccount k8dash-sa

# Give that service account root on the cluster
kubectl create clusterrolebinding k8dash-sa --clusterrole=cluster-admin --serviceaccount=default:k8dash-sa

# Find the secret that was created to hold the token for the SA
kubectl get secrets

# Show the contents of the secret to extract the token
kubectl describe secret k8dash-sa-token-xxxxx

Retrieve the token value from the secret and enter it into the login screen to access the dashboard.

Running k8dash with OpenId Connect (oidc)

K8dash makes using OpenId Connect for authentication easy. Assuming your cluster is configured to use OIDC, all you need to do is create a secret containing your credentials and run the kubernetes-k8dash-oidc.yaml config.

To learn more about configuring a cluster for OIDC, check out these great links

You can deploy k8dash with oidc support using something like the following script...

NOTE: never trust a file downloaded from the internet. Make sure to review the contents of kubernetes-k8dash-oidc.yaml before running the script below.

OIDC_URL=<put your endpoint url here... something like https://accounts.google.com>
OIDC_ID=<put your id here... something like blah-blah-blah.apps.googleusercontent.com>
OIDC_SECRET=<put your oidc secret here>

kubectl create secret -n kube-system generic k8dash \
--from-literal=url="$OIDC_URL" \
--from-literal=id="$OIDC_ID" \
--from-literal=secret="$OIDC_SECRET"

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/herbrandson/k8dash/kubernetes-k8dash-oidc.yaml

Metrics

K8dash relies heavily on metrics-server to display real time cluster metrics. It is strongly recommended to have metrics-server installed to get the best experiance from k8dash.