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Kong Manager

Kong Manager is the graphical user interface (GUI) for Kong Gateway. It uses the Kong Admin API under the hood to administer and control Kong Gateway. It comes in two options, depending on the edition of Kong Gateway that you’re running: open-source or enterprise.

Here’s a comparison of some of the capabilities you get access to between the Kong Manager Enterprise (or Free mode) edition, and the OSS edition:

Capability	Kong Manager Enterprise	Kong Manager OSS
Manage all workspaces in one place	✅	❌
Create and manage routes and services	✅	✅
Activate or deactivate plugins	✅	✅
Manage certificates	✅	✅
Group your services, plugins, consumers, and everything else exactly how you want them	✅	❌
Manage teams	✅	❌
Manage users and roles for both Kong Gateway and for the Dev Portal	✅	❌
Configure Dev Portals: customize appearance, manage developers and applications, and edit Dev Portal layouts, specs, and documentation	✅	❌
Monitor performance: visualize cluster-wide, workspace-level, or even object-level health using intuitive, customizable dashboards	✅	❌
Manage vaults	✅	✅

Note: If you are running Kong in traditional mode, increased traffic could lead to potential performance issues for the Kong proxy. Server-side sorting and filtering large quantities of entities can also cause increased CPU usage in both Kong Gateway and its database.

To access Kong Manager, go to the following URL after installing Kong Gateway (OSS): http://localhost:8002

Kong Manager interface

Figure 1: Kong Manager individual workspace dashboard

Top menu

Number	Item	Description
1	Workspaces	Dashboard for all the workspaces in the cluster.
2	Dev Portals	Overview of all Dev Portals in the cluster. At a glance, see which workspaces have active Dev Portals and access their URLs, or set up a Dev Portal instance.
3	Vitals	Dashboard for cluster-wide monitoring. Use the dashboard to:   • View request activity   • Track proxy and upstream latency over time   • See when the data store cache was accessed and whether the attempts to access it were successful or not
4	Teams	Manage team roles and permissions with RBAC, or map groups to your IdP.
5	Account settings	Manage your password and RBAC token.

Side menu

Number	Item	Description
6	Change workspace	Shortcut to quickly change between workspaces.
7	API Gateway	Manage the Kong Gateway entities in the current workspace.
8	Dev Portal	Workspace-specific Dev Portal configuration. If you enable Dev Portal for the current workspace, the menu will have additional items:   • Settings: General settings for the Dev Portal instance in this workspace   • Appearance: Customize your Dev Portal colors, fonts, and branding   • Developers: Manage developer requests and access   • Applications: Manage application requests and access   • Permissions: Manage roles and content permissions   • Editor: Access the Dev Portal files editor to configure layouts, documentation, and specs
9	Vitals	Monitor requests by access code for all services in the workspace.
10	Vaults	Manage secret vaults in your environment.

Workspace dashboard

Number	Item	Description
11	Settings	Edit the workspace avatar or delete the workspace.
12	Overview panel	Overview of key statistics for the workspace: number of services, consumers, and API requests, as well as the license validity information.
13	Total traffic graph	Total traffic in the workspace by status code within a selected time frame.
14	Time frame selector	Choose the time frame for the traffic graph, from the last 5 minutes to the last 12 hours.

Kong Manager OSS interface

Kong Manager Open Source (OSS) is the graphical user interface (GUI) for Kong Gateway (OSS). It uses the Kong Admin API under the hood to administer and control Kong Gateway (OSS).

Note: Kong Manager OSS is designed for use with the Open Source version of Kong Gateway (OSS).

Figure 2: Kong Manager OSS overview

Item	Description
Overview	Dashboard that contains information about your Kong Gateway (OSS).
Gateway Services	Overview of all services associated with your Kong Gateway (OSS). From this dashboard, you can add new services, manage existing services, and see all services at a glance.
Routes	Overview of all routes associated with your Kong Gateway (OSS). From this dashboard, you can add new routes, manage existing routes, and see all routes at a glance.
Consumers	Overview of all consumers associated with your Kong Gateway (OSS). From this dashboard, you can add new consumers, manage existing consumers, and see all consumers at a glance.
Plugins	Overview of all plugins associated with your Kong Gateway (OSS). From this dashboard, you can enable or disable plugins.
Upstreams	Overview of all upstreams associated with your Kong Gateway (OSS). From this dashboard, you can add new upstreams, manage existing upstreams, and see all upstreams at a glance.
Certificates	Manage your certificates for SSL/TLS termination for encrypted requests.
CA Certificates	Manage your CA certificates for client and server certificate validation.
SNIs	Manage SNI object one-to-many mappings of hostnames to a certificate.
Vaults	Manage the security of Kong Gateway (OSS) with centralized secrets.
Keys	Manage your asymmetric keys by adding a key object.
Key Sets	Manage your asymmetric key collections by adding a key set object.