On the login page, enter your username, password and – if required – the relevant domain. In both clouds, you should select the „Default“ domain, which is also selected by default. Once you have logged in successfully, you will be redirected to the dashboard’s home page, where you will see different menu items and functions depending on your role.

Structure of the user interface

The Horizon Dashboard user interface is divided into several sections. At the top is a bar showing your logged-in user, project and, where applicable, domain selection, as well as the menu for settings and logging out. In the left-hand navigation column, you’ll find the available functional areas such as Compute, Network, Storage and Identity; the exact selection depends on your permissions. The main area in the centre displays the currently selected view, for example overviews, detailed views, tables or wizards for creating new resources.

Key terms and concepts

There are a few key terms you need to know when working in the Cloud Dashboard:

A „project“ (also known as a tenant or account) groups together resources such as instances, volumes, networks and security groups, and serves as an organisational unit. „Instances“ are virtual machines that you can start, stop and manage, whilst „images“ serve as templates for new instances. Networks, routers, floating IPs and security groups together form the network infrastructure of your cloud environment and control accessibility and access protection. Depending on your assigned role (e.g. user or administrator), you also have access to administrative areas for managing projects, users and global resources.

Access to the API

To work with CLI tools and automation, you need to use the OpenStack API endpoints. To make accessing these as straightforward as possible, the Horizon dashboard allows you to easily download a so-called OpenStack RC file (or alternatively a clouds.yaml file), which automatically provides the correct environment variables for using, for example, CLI tools such as the python-openstackclient.