UI Customization

The OAP backend in this repository ships the data plane — receivers, analyzers, metric definitions, entity model, query surfaces. It does not ship dashboards or marketplace visualizations. Those live in apache/skywalking-horizon-ui, the official web UI, which releases independently of the OAP backend.

As of 11.0.0 the boot-time UITemplateInitializer / UIMenuInitializer have been removed and OAP no longer seeds any dashboard JSONs or menu items on startup. The dashboard library, the sidebar menu, the marketplace layout, i18n strings — every layer of visualization — ships from Horizon UI.

What Horizon UI provides

Horizon UI is the official web UI and the visualization layer of SkyWalking. It is a separate sub-project with its own release cadence and configuration; OAP only persists the dashboards that operators save. At a high level Horizon UI covers:

  • Setup — container image, horizon.yaml, OAP connection, file layout, debug logging.
  • Access control — local / LDAP / break-glass auth backends, RBAC roles and verbs, audit log, admin-page gating.
  • Customization — sidebar menu structure, layer dashboard templates, overview templates, adding a new layer.
  • Components — overview widgets, dashboard widgets, chart types.
  • Operate — cluster status & metadata, inspect.

Each area lives in the Horizon UI documentation.

Bundled UI templates

The OAP backend does not seed dashboard JSONs at boot anymore. Horizon UI owns and ships the entire bundled set in its own image: the default dashboard configurations for every supported layer, several cross-cutting overview and 3D infrastructure-map setups, the sidebar menu, and i18n translations. Operators customize these in the UI’s admin pages; see the Horizon UI documentation.

Editing dashboards from the UI

Horizon UI’s dashboard editor drives the admin REST endpoints from the browser. The write surface is gated behind the admin host’s security posture; see the admin-server security notice.