Google Cloud introduced Config Management Dashboard that allows the Platform Administrator or Operator to have a real-time picture of configuration syncs and failures across multiple Kubernetes clusters. This will help to simplify the daily critical tasks like reviewing the resources and the progress of configurations to ensure the behaviors are consistent across multiple clusters, and quickly identifies issues and act accordingly.

Config Management Dashboard improves upon the previously released tool ConfigSync. ConfigSync, the GitOps service of Google Cloud Platform as part of Anthos, is a tool to sync configurations like deployments, Helm charts, and Config maps, across multiple clusters. ConfigSync is open source and provides multi-cloud, hybrid support, and built-in observability. With ConfigSync platform administrator can check the status of the synchronizations and reconciliations using the GCP CLI.

Unfortunately, with ConfigSync the administrators can’t have real-time visibility of the synchronization status or problems. This is the main goal of Config Management Dashboard: allows operators and platform administrators to keep track of all the clusters that run the ConfigSync in real-time, on multiple cloud providers even on-premises clusters. It is also designed to allow the common operations that previously could be done only through CLI.

The key components of the Config Management Dashboard are Dashboard and Packages.

                                                    The Config Management Dashboard 

The dashboard gives an overall status of all configurations and resources on all the clusters monitored, in this way the operator can quickly understand the top concerns within the package or cluster. Packages contain the cluster configuration and resources that are synced across clusters and can be Helm Charts, Git Repos, or OCI registries.

                                                      View of the packages from the dashboard

Sync status is the status of the latest sync from the packages which can be a Git repository, Helm charts, or OCI registries. The status of a configuration deployed to the Kubernetes API by CondigSync is the reconcile status.

Administrators can easily install ConfigSync on multiple clusters and track the install status right from Config Management Dashboard and can quickly check the sync status and fix the not aligned status of a particular configuration across the clusters managed. Operators can also filter issues and identify errors on any resource of any cluster analyzing the error messages directly on the dashboard and can reconcile status of all the packages directly from the dashboard and not through the CLI.

Google plans to add more functionality to the Config Management Dashboard like rollout management, package deployment, and notifications to make the Dashboard easy to use.