Introduction to UI

The SkyWalking official UI provides the default and powerful visualization capabilities for SkyWalking to observe full-stack application.

The left side menu lists all available supported stack, with default dashboards.

Follow Official Dashboards menu explores all default dashboards about how to monitor different tech stacks.

Custom Dashboard

Besides, official dashboards, Dashboards provides customization to end users to add new tabs/pages/widgets, and flexibility to re-config the dashboard on your own preference.

The dashboard has two key attributes, Layer and Entity Type. Learn these two concepts first before you begin any customization. Also, trace, metrics, log analysis are relative to OAL, MAL, and LAL engines in SkyWalking kernel. You should learn them first too.

Service and All entity type dashboard could be set as root(set this to root), which mean this dashboard would be used as the entrance of its layer. If you have multiple root dashboards, UI could choose one randomly(Don’t recommend doing so).

Notice, dashboard editable is disabled on release, set system env(SW_ENABLE_UPDATE_UI_TEMPLATE=true) to activate them. Before you save the edited dashboard, it is just stored in memory, closing tab would LOSE the change permanently.

Settings

Settings provide language, server time zone, and auto-fresh option. These settings are stored in browser local storage. Unless you clear them manually, those would not change.

FAQ

Login and Authentication

SkyWalking doesn’t provide login and authentication as usual for years. If you need, a lot of Gateway solutions have provides well-established solutions, such as Nginx ecosystem.