The Ceph Dashboard is a module that adds a built-in Web based monitoring and administration application to the Ceph Manager (refer to Book “Deployment Guide”, Chapter 1 “SUSE Enterprise Storage 6 and Ceph”, Section 1.2.3 “Ceph Nodes and Daemons” for more details on Ceph Manager). You no longer need to know complex Ceph related commands to manage and monitor your Ceph cluster. You can either use the Ceph Dashboard's intuitive Web interface, or its built-in REST API.

The Ceph Dashboard is automatically enabled and configured with DeepSea's stage 3 during the deployment procedure (see Book “Deployment Guide”, Chapter 5 “Deploying with DeepSea/Salt”, Section 5.3 “Cluster Deployment”). In a Ceph cluster with multiple Ceph Manager instances, only the dashboard running on the currently active Ceph Manager daemon will serve incoming requests. Accessing the dashboard's TCP port on any of the other Ceph Manager instances that are currently on standby will perform an HTTP redirect (303) to the currently active Ceph Manager's dashboard URL. This way, you can point your browser to any of the Ceph Manager instances in order to access the dashboard. Consider this behavior when securing access with firewall or planning for HA setup.