IBM Cloud Pak foundational services Administration panel

The IBM Cloud Pak® foundational services console includes Administration panel that provides an overview of a cluster at a glance to Cluster Administrators and and Cloud Pak Administrators. From this UI console, you can view key metrics for specific components of the IBM Cloud Paks and IBM Cloud Pak foundational services that are deployed to the cluster.

As an administrator, this at a glance view of key details provides you with the capability to quickly identify and understand anomalies and take related actions to address these issues.

Administration panel provides details on all IBM Cloud Paks and IBM Cloud Pak foundational services that are deployed to the cluster and is separate from any overview-related pages that are included with a specific IBM Cloud Pak. For some metrics and components, you can select view more details within a side-panel and go to other UI dashboards, pages, or consoles, such as the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform web console, to complete associated actions.

Required permissions

The content on the Administration panel is accessible for users with the Cluster Administrator role or the Cloud Pak Administrator role.

Note: If Platform UI is extended with Cloud Pak Platform capabilities by installing the zen-cpp-operator, each administrative user must be added with the administrative role through the Access control page to access the Administration panel. For more information, see Managing console access.

Accessing Administration panel

Administration panel is available by default and is automatically deployed as a part of installing IBM Cloud Paks and IBM Cloud Pak foundational services.

This console can be accessed from opening the main navigation for the console and clicking Home.

The Administration panel can also be accessed from clicking the Cloud Pak switcher (9-dot icon) in the toolbar and clicking IBM Cloud Pak | Administration.

Overview

Administration panel is composed of three sections:

• The collapsible welcome widget in the console header.
• The quick navigation section below the welcome widget and to the left of the Overview section.
• The Overview section, which comprises the remainder of the page.

Welcome widget

This collapsible widget displays in the console header to provide you with a list of quick actions that you can take.

The listed quick actions are based on the IBM Cloud Pak foundational services that are deployed to the cluster. This list includes links to the dashboard, page, or side-panel where you can complete associated tasks. This list can include one or more of the following links depending on the services that are installed.

Note: The listed quick actions can also be accessed by opening the respective pages from the Administration category in the main navigation menu: Access control, Identity providers or Licensing. The options that are available in the menu depend on the services that are installed.

• Manage users, which opens the Access control page on the Users tab. You can use this page to create and edit user profiles.

• Manage identity providers, which opens the Identity providers page of the of the Identity and Access dashboard for the Identity and Access Management (IAM) service. You can use this page to configure an LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) connection for your product cluster, and to view and edit existing connections.

• Manage licenses, which opens the Licensing dashboard, where you can view the usage statistics for any deployed IBM Cloud Pak within a selected reporting period. From this dashboard, you can also view, manage, and create reports for licenses that are being used on a cluster.

For more information about the services that are related to any quick action, view the documentation for that service within the documentation for your deployed IBM Cloud Paks or the IBM Cloud Pak foundational services documentation.

Note: Previously this widget included cluster summary and cluster inventory data. This data now displays within separate summary cards in the Overview section of Administration panel.

Quick navigation

The Quick navigation section includes links for quickly accessing key sites or tools, such as for obtaining support or accessing the IBM Documentation for Administration panel.

You can customize the links under Quick navigation. To customize the links, click the Settings icon that is in the Overview section, and select Personalize navigation. Select the links that you want to display under Quick navigation, and click Save and close.

The Overview section

The Overview section includes individual summary cards for surfacing the key details for services and components.

The individual summary cards display high-level details for different critical subjects for your deployed IBM Cloud Paks and IBM Cloud Pak foundational services. For your deployed IBM Cloud Pak foundational services, you can view one or more of the following summary cards:

Summary cards

• Cluster memory usage

  The Cluster memory usage card displays the cluster capacity with a breakdown of how much storage memory is used by any deployed IBM Cloud Paks or other deployed objects, and how much memory remains. You can click the View OpenShift dashboard link to open the OpenShift web console dashboard for the cluster.

• Cluster inventory

  The Cluster inventory card includes statistics to identify the number of nodes, pods, and persistent volume claims (PVC) on the cluster. You can click the View OpenShift dashboard link to open the OpenShift web console dashboard for the cluster where you can view more details and work with the inventory objects. Clicking each object type opens a different page in the OpenShift web console:

  • Clicking the Nodes link opens the Nodes page of the OpenShift web console.
  • Clicking the Pods link opens the Pods page of the OpenShift web console.
  • Clicking the Persistent Volume Claims link opens the Persistent Volume Claims page of the OpenShift web console.

• Cloud Pak deployment

  Displays the instances of IBM Cloud Paks that are deployed in the cluster. When you click View details you can view more details about each instance, including the version of the IBM Cloud Pak that is deployed, the namespace, and the list of pods for the instance. You can browse this list so that only pods with a non-normal status are shown with a specific, filtered, pod link. You can click on each pod to open the Pods page of the OpenShift web console to work with the pod.

• CPU monitoring trends

  This card shows the current load usage trend for the past five minutes. This card also shows the load average over the past 24 hours and the pod that is responsible for the largest increase in load usage over that period. You can click the View Grafana dashboard link to open that dashboard and review additional monitoring data.

• Workload summary

  The Workload summary card shows a breakdown of the CPU, memory, and network usage by any deployed IBM Cloud Paks. Click View details to view a side-panel with additional details. This side-panel displays the three pods with highest utilization of each resource type, CPU, Memory, or Network (network transfer in/out), for the deployed IBM Cloud Paks. You can click any pod to open the OpenShift Metrics page of the OpenShift web console. This page displays related metrics for the resource types.

• System utility status

  Displays the status of key services. You can click View details or the service status to open the System utility status side-panel to view the following details for the installed services:

  • Status for each service
  • Failed pod count (if the services is not running)
  • Restart count (if the services is not running)

  • Failed pods (if the services is not running)

    You can click any listed failed pods to open the page for that pod in the OpenShift web console. You can also open the main Pods page for that web console from this side-panel.

    If all is well, and no errors have been reported, no extra details are available on the card.

• Licensing

  Displays the number of IBM pods that are missing license reporting and the number of products reported. You can click on the reported number to open a side-panel that identifies pods that are missing license reporting, and the individual products reported and associated values, such as the number of Virtual Processor Cores (VPC), the Managed Virtual Server (MVS), or other metrics. You can click on the pod name to see the pod in the OpenShift web console.

  Notes:

  • The metric units that are displayed on the side panel represent the current license usage of the product. To view the highest license usage in the reporting period, go to the Licensing dashboard.

If License Service Reporter is deployed on the cluster, you can also click View license usage to open the Licensing dashboard. From this dashboard, you can view the usage statistics for any deployed IBM Cloud Pak within a selected reporting period. Alternatively, you can navigate to the Licensing dashboard by selecting Licensing from the Administration category in the main navigation menu.

If License Service is not deployed, you can click Deploy License Service Reporter to view the instructions for deploying this component.

• System events

  This card shows the latest event notifications for the cluster. You can click View all to open the Events page of the OpenShift web console to see all recent notifications.

• Identity and user access

  Displays the number of active users and the number of total users. You can click Manage access link to open a side-panel with the following content:

  • Manage platform user access contains the list of links that open the Access Control page within your IBM Cloud Pak UI where you can add users, create and assigning roles and permissions, create user groups, and more. You can also click Identity providers link that opens the Identity providers page where you can view and configure identity providers, such as LDAP connection, to use for user authentication.
  • Additional access management contains the list of links for configuring additional access options if these options are available for your IBM Cloud Paks.

• Diagnostics

  Displays the previously generated diagnostics report, which you can download. You can also select to gather diagnostics and generate a new report. When you click Gather diagnostics, a side-panel opens. In this panel, you can select the group or groups of diagnostic statistics that you want to gather into a report. If you select to gather Cloud Pak data, you must also specify the namespace where the data is located.

For your deployed IBM Cloud Paks, additional summary cards can be available. For more information about the specific services and subject matter that is shown on these cards, refer to the associated IBM Cloud Pak documentation.

Summary card layout

You can customize the layout of the individual summary cards to make identifying the most critical information for you easier to view quickly.

To rearrange the layout, click the Settings icon that is in the Overview section, and select Personalize cards. You can now drag the individual cards where you want them to display. You can also remove and add cards. When you are finished, click Done.