4.3 Blog - What’s New in the 4.3 Console?

Overview

The latest release of OpenShift includes a variety of features to improve the experience for administrators and developers. For a full look at the new developer features, check out this blog post, What’s new in the OpenShift 4.3 console developer experience. For the Administrator perspective, we are striving to enhance observability features, evolve customization and extensibility options, and progress admin tasks to be more efficient.

Enhanced Observability

How do you troubleshoot issues on your cluster today? We want to reduce the time to resolution as much as possible by collecting and surfacing data from a variety of sources and providing intelligent suggestions for what to do next.

We made a number of dashboard updates including visual tweaks to the cluster dashboard as well as introducing a new project dashboard for project-scoped resources and metrics. We also added an integration with the Container Security Operator so you can monitor container image vulnerabilities in pods running on the cluster.

While the dashboards come in handy for understanding cluster status, we know users are not always logged into the OpenShift console. Now you can configure Alert Manager Receivers to dictate when and where alerts are surfaced.

Customization and Extensibility

We know it’s important for you to have flexibility in your environments so we have been adding various customization options and ways to extend the console to fit your needs. The extensibility features coming to the console in 4.3 are custom YAML samples, improved dynamic forms, the ability to embed external project links on the project dashboard, and the option to add custom catalog sources to the OperatorHub for streamlined access to operators.

You will be able to add cluster-wide samples to any kube resource with the `ConsoleYAMLSamples` CRD.

Some examples of dynamic form improvements are the nested FieldGroup support and optional advanced fields shown below.

With the embedded project-scoped launcher, link in context to your external interfaces right from the dashboard.

These features should lead to more seamless integrations and allow our partners to provide the best experience for their users.

Custom catalog sources can be found in the OperatorHub Global Config page, which is located in the Cluster Settings section of the navigation.

Users can add new catalog sources to surface additional options in the OperatorHub by clicking the `Create Catalog Source` button at the top of the list.

Simplified Admin Tasks

If you are a cluster administrator, you are likely looking for ways to automate tasks, manage cost and capacity, and quickly onboard new users without much overhead. Take a look at the user management improvements we made to simplify your day-to-day tasks. We added a dedicated `Users` list and an option to impersonate a user from the actions menu so you never have to guess what others in your organization are able to access.

Learn More

If you’d like to learn more about what the OpenShift team is up to or provide feedback on any of the new 4.3 features, please take this brief 3-minute survey.