The OpenStack dashboard, also known as Horizon, is a Web interface that enables cloud administrators and users to manage various OpenStack resources and services. The dashboard enables web-based interactions with the OpenStack Compute cloud controller through the OpenStack APIs. Horizon enables you to customize the brand of the dashboard. Horizon provides a set of core classes and reusable templates and tools. This example deployment uses an Apache web server.

Your OpenStack environment now includes the dashboard. You can launch an instance or add more services to your environment in the following chapters. After you install and configure the dashboard, you can complete the following tasks: Provide users with a public IP address, a username, and a password so they can access the dashboard through a web browser. In case of any SSL certificate connection problems, point the server IP address to a domain name, and give users access. Customize your dashboard. See section Customize the dashboard in the OpenStack Cloud Administrator Guide for information on setting up colors, logos, and site titles. Set up session storage. See section Set up session storage for the dashboard in the OpenStack Cloud Administrator Guide for information on user session data. To use the VNC client with the dashboard, the browser must support HTML5 Canvas and HTML5 WebSockets. For details about browsers that support noVNC, see https://github.com/kanaka/noVNC/blob/master/README.md, and https://github.com/kanaka/noVNC/wiki/Browser-support, respectively.