Central Dashboard

Your Kubeflow deployment includes a central dashboard that provides quick access to the Kubeflow components deployed in your cluster. The dashboard includes the following features:

• Shortcuts to specific actions, a list of recent pipelines and notebooks, and metrics, giving you an overview of your jobs and cluster in one view.
• A housing for the UIs of the components running in the cluster, including Pipelines, Katib, Notebooks, and more.
• A registration flow that prompts new users to set up their namespace if necessary.

Overview of Kubeflow UIs

The Kubeflow UIs include the following:

• Home: Home, the central hub to access recent resources, active experiments, and useful documentation.
• Notebook Servers: To manage Notebook servers.
• TensorBoards: To manage TensorBoard servers.
• Models: To manage deployed KFServing models.
• Volumes: To manage the cluster’s Volumes.
• Experiments (AutoML): To manage Katib experiments.
• Experiments (KFP): To manage Kubeflow Pipelines (KFP) experiments.
• Pipelines: To manage KFP pipelines.
• Runs: To manage KFP runs.
• Recurring Runs: To manage KFP recurring runs.
• Artifacts: To track ML Metadata (MLMD) artifacts.
• Executions: To track various component executions in MLMD.
• Manage Contributors: To configure user access sharing across namespaces in the Kubeflow deployment.

The central dashboard looks like this:

Accessing the central dashboard

To access the central dashboard, you need to connect to the Istio gateway that provides access to the Kubeflow service mesh.

How you access the Istio gateway varies depending on how you’ve configured it.

URL pattern with Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

If you followed the guide to deploying Kubeflow on GCP, the Kubeflow central UI is accessible at a URL of the following pattern:

https://<application-name>.endpoints.<project-id>.cloud.goog/

The URL brings up the dashboard illustrated above.

If you deploy Kubeflow with Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP), Kubeflow uses the Let’s Encrypt service to provide an SSL certificate for the Kubeflow UI. For troubleshooting issues with your certificate, see the guide to monitoring your Cloud IAP setup.

Using kubectl and port-forwarding

If you didn’t configure Kubeflow to integrate with an identity provider then you can port-forward directly to the Istio gateway.

Port-forwarding typically does not work if any of the following are true:

• You’ve deployed Kubeflow on GCP using the default settings with the CLI deployment.

• You’ve configured the Istio ingress to only accept HTTPS traffic on a specific domain or IP address.

• You’ve configured the Istio ingress to perform an authorization check (for example, using Cloud IAP or Dex).

You can access Kubeflow via kubectl and port-forwarding as follows:

1. Install kubectl if you haven’t already done so:

   • If you’re using Kubeflow on GCP, run the following command on the command line: gcloud components install kubectl.
   • Alternatively, follow the kubectl installation guide.

2. Use the following command to set up port forwarding to the Istio gateway.

   export NAMESPACE=istio-system
   kubectl port-forward -n ${NAMESPACE} svc/istio-ingressgateway 8080:80

3. Access the central navigation dashboard at:

   http://localhost:8080/
   

   Depending on how you’ve configured Kubeflow, not all UIs work behind port-forwarding to the reverse proxy.

   For some web applications, you need to configure the base URL on which the app is serving.

   For example, if you deployed Kubeflow with an ingress serving at https://example.mydomain.com and configured an application to be served at the URL https://example.mydomain.com/myapp, then the app may not work when served on https://localhost:8080/myapp because the paths do not match.

Next steps

• Explore the contributor management option where you can set up a single namespace for a shared deployment or configure multi-tenancy for your Kubeflow deployment.
• Set up your Jupyter notebooks in Kubeflow.