Getting Started
This page covers the ideas you need before using Constella: how resources and people are organized, how to sign in, which view you are working in, and where things live in the console.
Core concepts
Constella organizes people and resources in a hierarchy of domains and projects.
| Concept | What it is |
|---|---|
| Domain | A self-contained tenant with its own users, groups, projects and roles. A domain administrator manages everything inside it. Every installation starts with the Default domain. |
| Project | The owner of resources. Every virtual machine, disk, network and bucket belongs to exactly one project. Quotas are also set per project. Every installation starts with the system project. |
| User | A person or program that signs in. Users do not own resources; they work on the resources of the projects they belong to. |
| Group | A set of users. Adding a group to a project adds all of its members at once. |
| Role | What a user is in a project, for example admin. A user can hold several roles in the same project. |
| Permission policy | The actions a role is allowed to perform. When a user holds several roles, the most permissive policy applies. |
| Cloud account | The connection to one cloud or virtualization platform. Constella keeps its inventory in step with the platform through this connection. |
| Region and zone | Where resources run. Constella maps each connected cloud's regions and availability zones onto its own. |
Signing in
Open the Constella address in a browser and sign in with your username and password. If your administrator has configured single sign-on or a directory, the sign-in page shows those options as well.
After the first sign-in with a password that was given to you, open the account menu in the top-right corner and choose Change Password.
Use the published address
If the console shows "The configured Web console access address is …", you opened Constella at a different address than the one your administrator configured. Use the address in the message. Features such as the virtual machine console connect back to that address and may not work from any other.
The three views
Constella shows a different console depending on the view you choose in the switcher next to the logo. The switcher lists the views and projects your account can use.
| View | Who uses it | What you see |
|---|---|---|
| System View | Platform administrators | Every domain and project, cloud accounts, physical hosts, and platform-wide settings. |
| Domain View | Domain administrators | Every project and user in your domain. |
| Project View | Everyone | The resources of one project. The switcher shows the project's name. |
A menu appears only when your view has permission to use it. For example, Multicloud (cloud accounts), Physical Resources (hosts) and parts of IAM & Security appear only in System View. If a menu you expect is missing, check the switcher first. Seeing a project name there, such as system, means you are in Project View.
Finding your way around
The left-hand menu is organized by area:
| Menu | What it contains |
|---|---|
| Dashboard | Resource counts and usage at a glance. Panels can be customized. |
| Compute | Virtual machines, bare-metal servers, images, disks and snapshots, backups, security groups, IP subnets and elastic IPs, key pairs, specifications, physical hosts, and scheduling. |
| Container | Kubernetes clusters and their workloads, services, configuration and access control. |
| Network | Regions and zones, VPCs and route tables, elastic IPs, NAT gateways, DNS zones, and load balancers. |
| Storage | Block storage, object storage buckets, file systems (NAS), and backup storage. |
| Databases | Relational database instances, Redis-compatible caches, and MongoDB instances from connected clouds. |
| Middleware | Kafka and Elasticsearch instances from connected clouds. |
| Monitoring | Overview, dashboards, the metrics explorer, alert policies and history, and notifications. |
| Automation | Scheduled tasks and application orchestration. |
| Multicloud | Cloud accounts, proxy settings, and sync policies. |
| IAM & Security | Authentication sources, domains, projects, groups, users, roles, permission policies, and security alerts. |
Some menus only appear after a feature is enabled for your installation, or when a connected cloud offers that kind of resource.
Cloud Shell
Cloud Shell opens a terminal in the browser with climc, the Constella command-line client, already signed in. Use it for tasks that are quicker from the command line, or that have no screen in the console.
- Open it with the terminal icon in the top bar.
- Only system administrators in System View can open it. Commands in it run with full platform-administrator rights, so everyone else gets "Cloud Shell is available to system administrators in System View only." A system administrator working in Domain View or Project View switches to System View first.
- The terminal runs in a container of the Constella installation, not on your hosts or hypervisors. It reaches your platforms only through Constella.
Appearance and language
- Light or dark: use the theme button in the top bar. Constella remembers your choice in this browser.
- Language: choose English, Bahasa Indonesia, 日本語 or 中文 with the language selector on the sign-in page. To change it later, sign out and pick another language there.
Next steps
- Install Constella if your administrator has not done so.
- Connect a cloud account so there are resources to manage.
- Set up domains, projects and users for your team.