Unlocking Cloud Excellence with the OpenStack Dashboard: A Complete Overview and Why Btech Is Your Ideal OpenStack Partner

As organizations in Indonesia increasingly shift workloads to private and hybrid clouds, OpenStack continues to emerge as the most powerful and cost-efficient open-source cloud platform. Among the many components of OpenStack, the OpenStack Dashboard — also known as Horizon — stands out as the backbone of user experience and cloud management operations. Whether you are a system administrator, cloud operator, or project owner, Horizon provides an intuitive web-based interface that simplifies everyday cloud tasks while offering deep visibility into system resources.

This article dives into what the OpenStack Dashboard offers, how it enhances cloud operations, and why partnering with Btech can help you deploy, manage, and scale OpenStack efficiently and securely.

What Is the OpenStack Dashboard?

The OpenStack Dashboard (Horizon) is a browser-based graphical interface that allows users and administrators to manage OpenStack services without relying exclusively on CLI commands or API integrations. Once deployed, it is accessible via a simple URL such as:

http://<hostname>/dashboard/

Through this unified interface, users can create and manage cloud resources—including compute, storage, and networking—while administrators can oversee system-wide operations, quotas, services, and multi-project tenants.

Horizon makes complex cloud operations more visual, more intuitive, and more accessible, especially for teams transitioning from traditional environments to private cloud ecosystems.

Key Features of the OpenStack Dashboard

1. Admin Panel: Complete System Control

For administrators, the Admin tab offers full visibility and governance across all OpenStack services. Its capabilities include:

• System-wide usage reports – offering insights into resource consumption across tenants.

• Hypervisor and host management – including viewing host aggregates and availability zones.

• Instance lifecycle operations – such as migration, pause/resume, reboot, delete, and console access.

• Block storage management – including volume creation, deletion, and defining volume types.

• Flavor management – allowing creation of custom virtual hardware profiles (CPU, RAM, disk).

• Image management – upload, edit, or remove VM images.

• Networking management – including networks, routers, floating IPs, quotas, and metadata.

• Service monitoring – checking compute services, block storage services, network agents, orchestration services, and more.

With these capabilities, administrators gain a powerful central control center to ensure cloud stability, security, and performance.

2. Project Panel: Empowering Cloud Users

For end-users operating within a project scope, the Project panel provides all the tools needed to build and manage their cloud environments:

• Launch and manage instances – start, stop, reboot, snapshot, console access.

• Manage volumes and snapshots – attach/detach to instances, create backups, or clone volumes.

• Upload and use images – including snapshots and custom OS templates.

• Security configurations – manage security groups, firewall rules, and SSH key pairs.

• Floating IP management – allocate or release public IPs for instance access.

• Networking setup – create networks, subnets, routers, and trunks.

• Object storage access – create and manage Swift containers.

• Orchestration – deploy automated stacks using templates (such as Heat).

This separation of Admin and Project roles ensures that each user operates within a secure environment while still having everything they need to build applications and workloads on the cloud.

3. Identity Management: Secure User & Project Administration

The Dashboard also provides a dedicated Identity section, where administrators can:

• Create and modify users

• Assign roles and project membership

• Create and manage projects

• Control quota limits

• Enable, disable, or delete accounts

This ensures robust role-based access control, a foundational requirement for secure multi-tenant cloud environments.

Customization & Branding Capabilities

One of the notable features of Horizon is the ability to customize the dashboard’s look and feel to match corporate branding. Organizations can change:

• Logos

• Colors and themes

• Stylesheets

• Page titles

• Help links

• UI components

For enterprises or service providers offering cloud solutions to internal departments or external clients, these branding features greatly enhance professionalism and user trust.

Customization typically involves extracting the default theme, cloning it, modifying UI components, and redeploying the custom theme in the Horizon container image. While this is possible to do manually, many organizations prefer expert assistance to ensure compatibility and maintain support compliance.

Why OpenStack Matters for Modern Enterprises

OpenStack equips businesses with:

• Freedom from vendor lock-in

• Lower infrastructure costs

• Extensive scalability for private clouds

• Strong security and multi-tenancy

• Flexibility across compute, storage, and networking

With Horizon simplifying the management of these capabilities, OpenStack becomes an even more attractive solution for organizations transitioning into cloud-native environments.

Why Adopt OpenStack with Btech?

Deploying OpenStack is powerful—but complex without the right expertise. That’s where Btech comes in.

Btech offers:

• End-to-end OpenStack deployment and integration

• Architecture consulting tailored to your business needs

• Performance-optimized OpenStack environments

• 24/7 enterprise-grade support

• Security-hardened OpenStack configurations

• Multi-site and HA (High Availability) setups

• And full training for your technical teams

Whether you need a private cloud, NFV platform, Kubernetes integration, or hybrid cloud strategy, Btech ensures your OpenStack deployment is robust, scalable, and future-ready.

Ready to Modernize Your Infrastructure with OpenStack?

Btech is ready to help your organization transform its IT infrastructure using world-class OpenStack engineering.

📧 Email: contact@btech.id
📞 Phone/WhatsApp: +62-811-1123-242

Adopt OpenStack with confidence — partner with Btech and build a cloud that grows with your business.