A single pane of glass is a unified interface for viewing, monitoring, and managing resources distributed across providers, clusters, and tenants. It reduces context switching by consolidating operational information into one user experience, while supporting centralized oversight of large application and service estates. section 2.0 section 2.1
A useful single-pane-of-glass implementation provides:
- Centralization across infrastructure providers, locations, clusters, workloads, and tenants, with drill-down from an overview. section 2.1
- Consistency through normalized data, terminology, navigation, and resource views across otherwise different environments. section 2.1
- Ease of use through aggregated and visualized data that supports performance management and triage. section 2.1
- Access controls that prevent unnecessary administrator access to centralized views and reduce privacy and security risks. section 2.1
In Anthos, the pattern is implemented through the Google Cloud console, the Anthos dashboard, the Connect framework, and fleets. The dashboard extends the GKE dashboard; Connect communicates with clusters located anywhere; fleets aggregate clusters for common work. section 2.3
Production cluster oversight
An administrator registers clusters with a Google Cloud project and opens the Google Cloud console to view multiple clusters together. The view identifies resource locations, providers, and required management actions, avoiding separate logins during operational triage. section 5.1
Use the multi-cluster console figure to visualize how registered clusters appear together in the unified interface. section 5.1
