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Ceph Dashboard at a Glance

Better in Color

Article from ADMIN 93/2026

By Martin Loschwitz

To hardcore command-line enthusiasts, the Ceph Dashboard might sound like a frowned-upon point-and-click gadget, but the advantages simply cannot be ignored; so much so, that Ceph Dashboard has established a firm following in the Ceph universe.

Right from the outset, Ceph's developers designed Ceph [1] to be a distributed, highly automated storage system, and its key component, RADOS [2], does everything you could reasonably expect an object storage system to do. Admins appreciate Ceph because RADOS is stable, handles hardware failures in a reliable way, and comes with three versatile user interfaces to the object storage system: the Ceph filesystem (CephFS) [3], the Ceph Object Gateway (RADOS gateway, RGW) [4], and the RADOS block device (RBD) [5].

Of course, any mass of technology of this magnitude will inevitably introduce complexity. A RADOS cluster consists of a multitude of components and services that only work together properly if configured correctly. Add to this events that can disrupt the cluster's structure and topology in a short space of time. Object Storage Daemons (OSDs) [6], for example, can fail because the underlying drive has failed. In this case, placement groups [7] change their states, resulting in rebalancing processes running in the background and clients generating a wide range of different loads.

Of course, you can fully monitor and control all of these goings on at the command line, albeit at the cost of actively having to piece together relevant information gleaned by running multiple commands, and that, in turn, requires you to have prior experience of working with RADOS. This situation is precisely where the Ceph Dashboard [8] enters the scene.