<p>Is it possible to have a <em>restricted</em> Kubernetes dashboard? The idea is to have a pod running <code>kubectl proxy</code> in the cluster (protected with basic HTTP authentication) to get a quick overview of the status:</p>

<ul>
<li>Log output of the pods</li>
<li>Running services and pods</li>
<li>Current CPU/memory usage</li>
</ul>

<p>However, I do <em>not</em> want users to be able to do "privileged" actions, like creating new pods, deleting pods or accessing secrets.</p>

<p>Is there some option to start the dashboard with a specified user or with restricted permissions?</p>

<p>Based on the answer from lwolf, I used <a href="https://github.com/kubernetes/dashboard/blob/master/src/deploy/kubernetes-dashboard.yaml" rel="nofollow noreferrer">the kubernetes-dashboard.yaml</a> and changed it to run on the slaves, in the default namespace.</p>

<p>The important change is the <code>kind: ClusterRole, name: view</code> part, which assigns the <em>view</em> role to the dashboard user.</p>

<pre><code>apiVersion: v1
kind: ServiceAccount
metadata:
  labels:
    k8s-app: kubernetes-dashboard
  name: ro-dashboard
---
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: ClusterRoleBinding
metadata:
  name: ro-dashboard
  labels:
    k8s-app: kubernetes-dashboard
roleRef:
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
  kind: ClusterRole
  name: view
subjects:
- kind: ServiceAccount
  name: ro-dashboard
  apiGroup: ''
  namespace: default
---
kind: Deployment
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
metadata:
  labels:
    k8s-app: kubernetes-dashboard
  name: ro-dashboard
spec:
  replicas: 1
  revisionHistoryLimit: 0
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      k8s-app: kubernetes-dashboard
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        k8s-app: kubernetes-dashboard
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: kubernetes-dashboard
        image: gcr.io/google_containers/kubernetes-dashboard-amd64:v1.6.3
        ports:
        - containerPort: 9090
          protocol: TCP
        livenessProbe:
          httpGet:
            path: /
            port: 9090
          initialDelaySeconds: 30
          timeoutSeconds: 30
      serviceAccountName: ro-dashboard
---
kind: Service
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  labels:
    k8s-app: kubernetes-dashboard
  name: ro-dashboard
spec:
  type: LoadBalancer
  ports:
  - port: 80
    targetPort: 9090
  selector:
    k8s-app: kubernetes-dashboard
</code></pre>
