Ceph Manager Dashboard v2

The original Ceph Manager Dashboard that was introduced in Ceph "Luminous" started out as a simple, read-only view into various run-time information and performance data of a Ceph cluster, without authentication or any administrative functionality.

However, as it turns out, there is a growing demand for adding more web-based management capabilities, to make it easier for administrators that prefer a WebUI to manage Ceph over the command line. Sage Weil also touched upon this topic in the Ceph Developer monthly call in December and created an etherpad with some ideas for improvement.

A preliminary screen shot of the Ceph health dashboard

After learning about this, we approached Sage and John Spray from the Ceph project and offered our help to implement the missing functionality. Based on our experiences in developing the Ceph support in openATTIC, we think we have a lot to offer in the form of code and experience in creating a Ceph administration and monitoring UI.

We started this endeavour by creating a prototype of the current dashboard, based on the Angular web development framework. While working on it, we proposed the following: we will go ahead and start a new Manager module, currently dubbed "dashboard_v2". The code and architecture of this module is inspired by and partially derived from the openATTIC architecture (both the backend and WebUI).

The development is actively driven by the openATTIC team. As a first milestone, we aim to migrate as much of the existing dashboard functionality as possible, while also building a foundation that supports porting existing functionality from openATTIC that is missing in the original dashboard (e.g. the possibility to add/edit/remove Ceph pools and RBDs, managing Ceph Object Gateway users and their access keys).

Some functionality provided by the standalone version of openATTIC depends on the Salt-based DeepSea framework (e.g. iSCSI target management and NFS share management), these features will be added at some later stage, hopefully in a more generic fashion.

We think that contributing both our code and developer time has a lot of benefits for the Ceph project and its users: a native, built-in management and monitoring application that will evolve over time. Being part of the upstream project repo allows for a much tighter integration and less overhead.

After laying out the initial groundwork, we announced our project on the ceph-devel mailing list last week.

In the video recording of Sage's LinuxConfAu presentation "Making distributed storage easy: usability in Ceph Luminous and beyond" you can get his take on the current dashboard and this future development (the dashboard part starts at 28m:08s):

We'll also be talking about this project in the Software Defined Storage Developer room at this weekend's FOSDEM conference in Brussels, Belgium, and at next week's Ceph Day in Darmstadt, Germany.

I've also submitted a talk about this for the upcoming Cephalocon in Beijing, China. Let's see if it will be accepted!

For the time being, the main development take place in a git branch wip-mgr-dashboard_v2, located in a fork of the Ceph git repository on github. Pull requests for the module are also managed on this fork, until the module has been merged upstream. We also openened a "WIP, DNM" pull request in the upstream Ceph git repo, so you can follow the ongoing development here.