Navigating OpenSearch Dashboards
You can navigate OpenSearch Dashboards from the home page and the left navigation panel, which provides access to all OpenSearch Dashboards applications.
The OpenSearch Dashboards home page
The OpenSearch Dashboards home page has two variants: the classic home page and the workspaces home page.
The classic home page
The following image shows the home page in classic navigation, with the navigation panel open.
- The header bar (A) contains the following elements from left to right:
(menu) The menu icon.
(home) The home icon.- The breadcrumb display. It contains only one label, “Home”, on the home page.
- The menu area (B). This area, the right portion of the header bar, contains a context-sensitive application menu when an application is active in the main panel.
(help) The help icon.
- The navigation panel (C) is the primary means of navigating OpenSearch Dashboards. It contains collapsible menus grouped by function (Recently viewed, OpenSearch Dashboards apps, Observability, and so on). See The left navigation panel.
- The panel or main panel (D) contains the current application or UI page.
Workspaces navigation
Introduced 2.18.0
OpenSearch Dashboards offers an alternative navigation mode called workspaces navigation. Workspaces group applications into focused environments, for example, Analytics, Observability, or Security Analytics. In workspaces navigation, the home page lists your workspaces, as shown in the following image, and you must first select a workspace to access applications.
After you select a workspace, the left navigation panel provides access to the applications for that workspace, similarly to classic navigation, as shown in the following image. Some features, such as creating visualizations using queries, are only available within workspaces.
Workspaces are enabled by an OpenSearch Dashboards administrator. For more information, see Workspaces.
The left navigation panel
Use the left navigation panel on the left side of the UI to select any application or settings page that you want to use. To open the navigation panel, select the (menu) icon at the top of the page.
The following images show the most-used features in classic and workspaces navigation.
| Classic navigation panel | Workspaces navigation panel |
|---|---|
 |  |
- The menu icon (A) opens and closes the navigation panel.
- Discover (B) opens the Discover application in the main panel. See Exploring data with Discover.
- Dashboards (C) opens the Dashboards application in the main panel. See Creating dashboards.
- Visualize (D) opens the Visualize application in the main panel. See Building data visualizations.
- Observability (E) opens the Observability menu in the navigation panel. See Observability.