Getting started

The Linkerd dashboard provides a user-friendly interface for monitoring and managing your Linkerd service mesh within a cluster.

With the dashboard, you can:

• Monitor the health of the Linkerd control plane.
• View key performance metrics (“golden metrics”) for all meshed workloads in your cluster.
• Visualize traffic flow between workloads with an interactive traffic chart, making it easy to identify issues within your service call chain.

Prerequisite: The Linkerd dashboard requires Buoyant Enterprise Linkerd (BEL) to be installed in the cluster.

Installation

The dashboard is managed via a Helm chart. To install or upgrade to the latest stable version, run:

helm upgrade -i -n monitoring --create-namespace \
    linkerd-dashboard oci://ghcr.io/buoyantio/linkerd-dashboard

Accessing the dashboard

To access the dashboard, forward port 8080 from the dashboard workload:

kubectl -n monitoring port-forward deployments/linkerd-dashboard 8080 &

Then, open your browser and navigate to http://localhost:8080.

Configuring multi-cluster policy

If you have installed the multi-cluster extension, it includes a policy configuration that prevents unauthorized access to pods running in the linkerd-multicluster namespace. This policy configuration only grants access to the core Linkerd control plane by default. To see multi-cluster metrics in the dashboard, you’ll need to add the following configuration to the linkerd-multicluster namespace:

apiVersion: policy.linkerd.io/v1beta1
kind: ServerAuthorization
metadata:
  annotations:
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/part-of: linkerd-buoyant
  name: service-mirror-linkerd-dashboard
  namespace: linkerd-multicluster
spec:
  client:
    meshTLS:
      serviceAccounts:
        - name: linkerd-dashboard
          namespace: monitoring
  server:
    name: service-mirror

If you save the above configuration as policy.yaml, you can apply it to your cluster with:

kubectl apply -f policy.yaml