Access the dashboard#

Introduction#

The Aspen Mesh dashboard is accessible from the aspen-mesh-controlplane service in the istio-system namespace in your cluster, on port 19001. The URL to the dashboard is:

http://aspen-mesh-controlplane.istio-system.svc.cluster.local:19001

Off-cluster access#

To access the dashboard as a user off the cluster, you have these options:

Port forward: For initial testing or lab environments, it may be suitable to just port forward and access it from your desktop client.

$ kubectl port-forward --namespace istio-system \
    $(kubectl get pod -n istio-system -l app=aspen-mesh-controlplane -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}') \
    19001

$ open http://localhost:19001/

Platform-specific: Your cloud or Kubernetes platform may already have a platform-specific technique for exposing services. For instance, you may expose services by defining ingress resources. Consult your platform-specific documentation for this. If your platform will expose this on an untrusted network, please ensure your platform provides an authentication proxy.

Expose the aspen-mesh-controlplane service in the istio-system namespace on port 19001. For example, an ingress specification may look like:
```
$ kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: aspen-mesh-ingress
  namespace: istio-system
  annotations:
    # Platform-specific annotations
    # We recommend enabling TLS.
spec:
  rules:
  - host: aspenmesh.admin.yourenvironment.com
    http:
      paths:
      - backend:
          serviceName: aspen-mesh-controlplane
          servicePort: 19001
EOF
```

Service type: LoadBalancer: Your cloud or Kubernetes platform may create an external load balancer for you if you declare a service with type: LoadBalancer. If your platform will expose this load balancer on an untrusted network, please ensure your platform provides an authentication proxy.

Create a service with type: LoadBalancer, like this:

$ kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: aspen-mesh-controlplane-external
  namespace: istio-system
  annotations:
    # Platform-specific annotations
    # We recommend enabling TLS
  labels:
    app: aspen-mesh-controlplane
spec:
  ports:
  - name: http
    port: 19001
    protocol: TCP
    targetPort: http
  - name: grpc
    port: 19000
    protocol: TCP
    targetPort: grpc
  selector:
    app: aspen-mesh-controlplane
  type: LoadBalancer
EOF