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 Kong Gateway	✅	❌
Centrally store and easily access key sets and keys	✅	✅
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

Item	Description
Workspaces	Dashboard for all the workspaces in the cluster.
Teams	Manage team roles and permissions with RBAC, or map groups to your IdP.

Side menu

Item	Description
Dashboard	See information about a workspace.
API Gateway	Manage the Kong Gateway entities in the current workspace.
Secrets	Manage vaults, keys and key sets for your environment.

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.