buoyant.io

Getting started

Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd (BEL) provides a user-friendly dashboard 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.
Linkerd dashboard

Prerequisites

  • Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd installed on your cluster

Metrics pipeline

The dashboard ships with a built-in Prometheus instance that is configured to scrape all Linkerd proxies on the cluster and store that data for 6 hours.

This Prometheus instance may consume a large amount of memory, depending on the size of your deployment. Please monitor your deployment carefully.

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/charts/linkerd-dashboard

helm upgrade -i -n monitoring --create-namespace \
    --set image.tag=0.10.1-fips \
    linkerd-dashboard oci://ghcr.io/buoyantio/charts/linkerd-dashboard
Important: If you are using an external Prometheus, it will need to be injected for the connection from the dashboard to be FIPS validated.

New in v0.9.0

Setting a base URL: If you do not want to run the dashboard at the root, use the same command as above and set the baseUrl value, for example: --set baseUrl=/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.

Multi-cluster configuration

If you have installed BEL’s multi-cluster extension, follow the guide to configure multi-cluster policy for the dashboard.