UI

The SkyWalking web UI ships from a dedicated project, apache/skywalking-horizon-ui. This OAP distribution does not bundle a UI.

Horizon UI releases independently of the OAP backend, on its own schedule. This repository is not bound to any specific Horizon UI version — backend compatibility is Horizon UI’s responsibility, and it supports OAP from 11.0 onward. Don’t lock the UI to an OAP x.y.z tag; pick the UI version following Horizon UI’s OAP-compatibility notes.

Run Horizon UI with Docker

Released images are published to Docker Hub at apache/skywalking-ui — use the latest tag, or a horizon-<version> tag for a reproducible deploy. Per-commit development images are pushed to ghcr.io/apache/skywalking-horizon-ui and are for testing the development branch, not production.

Horizon UI is configured through a mounted horizon.yaml file (not environment variables). The OAP wiring it needs is the query host and the admin host; the Zipkin host is only required if a layer uses Zipkin traces:

docker run --name skywalking-ui --restart always -d \
  -p 8081:8081 \
  -v "$PWD/horizon.yaml:/app/horizon.yaml:ro" \
  apache/skywalking-ui:latest

A minimal horizon.yaml pointed at your OAP cluster:

oap:
  queryUrl: http://oap:12800        # GraphQL / query surface
  adminUrl: http://oap:17128        # admin host (runtime-rule, inspect, dsl-debugging, status)
  zipkinUrl: http://oap:9412/zipkin # only if a layer uses Zipkin traces

There is no default account — you must configure at least one login (local users or LDAP) before anyone can sign in. Authentication, RBAC, sessions, the full horizon.yaml reference, and the container layout are all covered in the Horizon UI docs; don’t expect this page to mirror them.

What Horizon UI provides

Beyond the application itself, Horizon UI ships the entire visualization layer that the OAP backend no longer seeds: the default dashboard configurations for every supported layer, several cross-cutting overview and 3D infrastructure-map setups, i18n translations, and the sidebar menu. Operators customize these in the UI’s admin pages.

Documentation

Horizon UI’s documentation is the source of truth and tracks the UI release, not this backend. Start here: