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 the bundled template set — layer dashboards, overview templates, and alert views — and ships them in its own image. See apache/skywalking-horizon-ui · apps/bff/src/bundled_templates.

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.