# 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](/linkerd-dashboard/getting-started/dashboard.png)

## 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
instance is intended for demo and getting-started purposes only and is not
suited for production use.

For production deployments, provide your own production-ready Prometheus
instance. Also note that this 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:

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

> [!NOTE]
> _[New in v0.9.0](/release-notes/linkerd-dashboard/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:

```bash
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](/linkerd-dashboard/guides/configuring-multi-cluster-policy/)
for the dashboard.

## FIPS support

The dashboard will communicate using FIPS-validated cryptographic modules when
used in conjunction with
[BEL FIPS](/buoyant-enterprise-linkerd/latest/features/fips/) support.