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Troubleshooting Clusters

Debugging common cluster issues.

1: Troubleshooting kubectl
2: Resource metrics pipeline
3: Tools for Monitoring Resources
4: Monitor Node Health
5: Debugging Kubernetes nodes with crictl
6: Auditing
7: Debugging Kubernetes Nodes With Kubectl
8: Developing and debugging services locally using telepresence
9: Windows debugging tips

This doc is about cluster troubleshooting; we assume you have already ruled out your application as the root cause of the problem you are experiencing. See the application troubleshooting guide for tips on application debugging. You may also visit the troubleshooting overview document for more information.

For troubleshooting kubectl, refer to Troubleshooting kubectl.

Listing your cluster

The first thing to debug in your cluster is if your nodes are all registered correctly.

Run the following command:

kubectl get nodes

And verify that all of the nodes you expect to see are present and that they are all in the Ready state.

To get detailed information about the overall health of your cluster, you can run:

kubectl cluster-info dump

Example: debugging a down/unreachable node

Sometimes when debugging it can be useful to look at the status of a node -- for example, because you've noticed strange behavior of a Pod that's running on the node, or to find out why a Pod won't schedule onto the node. As with Pods, you can use kubectl describe node and kubectl get node -o yaml to retrieve detailed information about nodes. For example, here's what you'll see if a node is down (disconnected from the network, or kubelet dies and won't restart, etc.). Notice the events that show the node is NotReady, and also notice that the pods are no longer running (they are evicted after five minutes of NotReady status).

kubectl get nodes

NAME                     STATUS       ROLES     AGE     VERSION
kube-worker-1            NotReady     <none>    1h      v1.23.3
kubernetes-node-bols     Ready        <none>    1h      v1.23.3
kubernetes-node-st6x     Ready        <none>    1h      v1.23.3
kubernetes-node-unaj     Ready        <none>    1h      v1.23.3

kubectl describe node kube-worker-1

Name:               kube-worker-1
Roles:              <none>
Labels:             beta.kubernetes.io/arch=amd64
                    beta.kubernetes.io/os=linux
                    kubernetes.io/arch=amd64
                    kubernetes.io/hostname=kube-worker-1
                    kubernetes.io/os=linux
Annotations:        kubeadm.alpha.kubernetes.io/cri-socket: /run/containerd/containerd.sock
                    node.alpha.kubernetes.io/ttl: 0
                    volumes.kubernetes.io/controller-managed-attach-detach: true
CreationTimestamp:  Thu, 17 Feb 2022 16:46:30 -0500
Taints:             node.kubernetes.io/unreachable:NoExecute
                    node.kubernetes.io/unreachable:NoSchedule
Unschedulable:      false
Lease:
  HolderIdentity:  kube-worker-1
  AcquireTime:     <unset>
  RenewTime:       Thu, 17 Feb 2022 17:13:09 -0500
Conditions:
  Type                 Status    LastHeartbeatTime                 LastTransitionTime                Reason              Message
  ----                 ------    -----------------                 ------------------                ------              -------
  NetworkUnavailable   False     Thu, 17 Feb 2022 17:09:13 -0500   Thu, 17 Feb 2022 17:09:13 -0500   WeaveIsUp           Weave pod has set this
  MemoryPressure       Unknown   Thu, 17 Feb 2022 17:12:40 -0500   Thu, 17 Feb 2022 17:13:52 -0500   NodeStatusUnknown   Kubelet stopped posting node status.
  DiskPressure         Unknown   Thu, 17 Feb 2022 17:12:40 -0500   Thu, 17 Feb 2022 17:13:52 -0500   NodeStatusUnknown   Kubelet stopped posting node status.
  PIDPressure          Unknown   Thu, 17 Feb 2022 17:12:40 -0500   Thu, 17 Feb 2022 17:13:52 -0500   NodeStatusUnknown   Kubelet stopped posting node status.
  Ready                Unknown   Thu, 17 Feb 2022 17:12:40 -0500   Thu, 17 Feb 2022 17:13:52 -0500   NodeStatusUnknown   Kubelet stopped posting node status.
Addresses:
  InternalIP:  192.168.0.113
  Hostname:    kube-worker-1
Capacity:
  cpu:                2
  ephemeral-storage:  15372232Ki
  hugepages-2Mi:      0
  memory:             2025188Ki
  pods:               110
Allocatable:
  cpu:                2
  ephemeral-storage:  14167048988
  hugepages-2Mi:      0
  memory:             1922788Ki
  pods:               110
System Info:
  Machine ID:                 9384e2927f544209b5d7b67474bbf92b
  System UUID:                aa829ca9-73d7-064d-9019-df07404ad448
  Boot ID:                    5a295a03-aaca-4340-af20-1327fa5dab5c
  Kernel Version:             5.13.0-28-generic
  OS Image:                   Ubuntu 21.10
  Operating System:           linux
  Architecture:               amd64
  Container Runtime Version:  containerd://1.5.9
  Kubelet Version:            v1.23.3
  Kube-Proxy Version:         v1.23.3
Non-terminated Pods:          (4 in total)
  Namespace                   Name                                 CPU Requests  CPU Limits  Memory Requests  Memory Limits  Age
  ---------                   ----                                 ------------  ----------  ---------------  -------------  ---
  default                     nginx-deployment-67d4bdd6f5-cx2nz    500m (25%)    500m (25%)  128Mi (6%)       128Mi (6%)     23m
  default                     nginx-deployment-67d4bdd6f5-w6kd7    500m (25%)    500m (25%)  128Mi (6%)       128Mi (6%)     23m
  kube-system                 kube-proxy-dnxbz                     0 (0%)        0 (0%)      0 (0%)           0 (0%)         28m
  kube-system                 weave-net-gjxxp                      100m (5%)     0 (0%)      200Mi (10%)      0 (0%)         28m
Allocated resources:
  (Total limits may be over 100 percent, i.e., overcommitted.)
  Resource           Requests     Limits
  --------           --------     ------
  cpu                1100m (55%)  1 (50%)
  memory             456Mi (24%)  256Mi (13%)
  ephemeral-storage  0 (0%)       0 (0%)
  hugepages-2Mi      0 (0%)       0 (0%)
Events:
...

kubectl get node kube-worker-1 -o yaml

apiVersion: v1
kind: Node
metadata:
  annotations:
    kubeadm.alpha.kubernetes.io/cri-socket: /run/containerd/containerd.sock
    node.alpha.kubernetes.io/ttl: "0"
    volumes.kubernetes.io/controller-managed-attach-detach: "true"
  creationTimestamp: "2022-02-17T21:46:30Z"
  labels:
    beta.kubernetes.io/arch: amd64
    beta.kubernetes.io/os: linux
    kubernetes.io/arch: amd64
    kubernetes.io/hostname: kube-worker-1
    kubernetes.io/os: linux
  name: kube-worker-1
  resourceVersion: "4026"
  uid: 98efe7cb-2978-4a0b-842a-1a7bf12c05f8
spec: {}
status:
  addresses:
  - address: 192.168.0.113
    type: InternalIP
  - address: kube-worker-1
    type: Hostname
  allocatable:
    cpu: "2"
    ephemeral-storage: "14167048988"
    hugepages-2Mi: "0"
    memory: 1922788Ki
    pods: "110"
  capacity:
    cpu: "2"
    ephemeral-storage: 15372232Ki
    hugepages-2Mi: "0"
    memory: 2025188Ki
    pods: "110"
  conditions:
  - lastHeartbeatTime: "2022-02-17T22:20:32Z"
    lastTransitionTime: "2022-02-17T22:20:32Z"
    message: Weave pod has set this
    reason: WeaveIsUp
    status: "False"
    type: NetworkUnavailable
  - lastHeartbeatTime: "2022-02-17T22:20:15Z"
    lastTransitionTime: "2022-02-17T22:13:25Z"
    message: kubelet has sufficient memory available
    reason: KubeletHasSufficientMemory
    status: "False"
    type: MemoryPressure
  - lastHeartbeatTime: "2022-02-17T22:20:15Z"
    lastTransitionTime: "2022-02-17T22:13:25Z"
    message: kubelet has no disk pressure
    reason: KubeletHasNoDiskPressure
    status: "False"
    type: DiskPressure
  - lastHeartbeatTime: "2022-02-17T22:20:15Z"
    lastTransitionTime: "2022-02-17T22:13:25Z"
    message: kubelet has sufficient PID available
    reason: KubeletHasSufficientPID
    status: "False"
    type: PIDPressure
  - lastHeartbeatTime: "2022-02-17T22:20:15Z"
    lastTransitionTime: "2022-02-17T22:15:15Z"
    message: kubelet is posting ready status
    reason: KubeletReady
    status: "True"
    type: Ready
  daemonEndpoints:
    kubeletEndpoint:
      Port: 10250
  nodeInfo:
    architecture: amd64
    bootID: 22333234-7a6b-44d4-9ce1-67e31dc7e369
    containerRuntimeVersion: containerd://1.5.9
    kernelVersion: 5.13.0-28-generic
    kubeProxyVersion: v1.23.3
    kubeletVersion: v1.23.3
    machineID: 9384e2927f544209b5d7b67474bbf92b
    operatingSystem: linux
    osImage: Ubuntu 21.10
    systemUUID: aa829ca9-73d7-064d-9019-df07404ad448

Looking at logs

For now, digging deeper into the cluster requires logging into the relevant machines. Here are the locations of the relevant log files. On systemd-based systems, you may need to use journalctl instead of examining log files.

Control Plane nodes

/var/log/kube-apiserver.log - API Server, responsible for serving the API
/var/log/kube-scheduler.log - Scheduler, responsible for making scheduling decisions
/var/log/kube-controller-manager.log - a component that runs most Kubernetes built-in controllers, with the notable exception of scheduling (the kube-scheduler handles scheduling).

Worker Nodes

/var/log/kubelet.log - logs from the kubelet, responsible for running containers on the node
/var/log/kube-proxy.log - logs from kube-proxy, which is responsible for directing traffic to Service endpoints

Cluster failure modes

This is an incomplete list of things that could go wrong, and how to adjust your cluster setup to mitigate the problems.

Contributing causes

VM(s) shutdown
Network partition within cluster, or between cluster and users
Crashes in Kubernetes software
Data loss or unavailability of persistent storage (e.g. GCE PD or AWS EBS volume)
Operator error, for example, misconfigured Kubernetes software or application software

Specific scenarios

API server VM shutdown or apiserver crashing
- Results
  - unable to stop, update, or start new pods, services, replication controller
  - existing pods and services should continue to work normally unless they depend on the Kubernetes API
API server backing storage lost
- Results
  - the kube-apiserver component fails to start successfully and become healthy
  - kubelets will not be able to reach it but will continue to run the same pods and provide the same service proxying
  - manual recovery or recreation of apiserver state necessary before apiserver is restarted
Supporting services (node controller, replication controller manager, scheduler, etc) VM shutdown or crashes
- currently those are colocated with the apiserver, and their unavailability has similar consequences as apiserver
- in future, these will be replicated as well and may not be co-located
- they do not have their own persistent state
Individual node (VM or physical machine) shuts down
- Results
  - pods on that Node stop running
Network partition
- Results
  - partition A thinks the nodes in partition B are down; partition B thinks the apiserver is down. (Assuming the master VM ends up in partition A.)
Kubelet software fault
- Results
  - crashing kubelet cannot start new pods on the node
  - kubelet might delete the pods or not
  - node marked unhealthy
  - replication controllers start new pods elsewhere
Cluster operator error
- Results
  - loss of pods, services, etc
  - lost of apiserver backing store
  - users unable to read API
  - etc.

Mitigations

Action: Use the IaaS provider's automatic VM restarting feature for IaaS VMs
- Mitigates: Apiserver VM shutdown or apiserver crashing
- Mitigates: Supporting services VM shutdown or crashes
Action: Use IaaS providers reliable storage (e.g. GCE PD or AWS EBS volume) for VMs with apiserver+etcd
- Mitigates: Apiserver backing storage lost
Action: Use high-availability configuration
- Mitigates: Control plane node shutdown or control plane components (scheduler, API server, controller-manager) crashing
  - Will tolerate one or more simultaneous node or component failures
- Mitigates: API server backing storage (i.e., etcd's data directory) lost
  - Assumes HA (highly-available) etcd configuration
Action: Snapshot apiserver PDs/EBS-volumes periodically
- Mitigates: Apiserver backing storage lost
- Mitigates: Some cases of operator error
- Mitigates: Some cases of Kubernetes software fault
Action: use replication controller and services in front of pods
- Mitigates: Node shutdown
- Mitigates: Kubelet software fault
Action: applications (containers) designed to tolerate unexpected restarts
- Mitigates: Node shutdown
- Mitigates: Kubelet software fault

What's next

Learn about the metrics available in the Resource Metrics Pipeline
Discover additional tools for monitoring resource usage
Use Node Problem Detector to monitor node health
Use kubectl debug node to debug Kubernetes nodes
Use crictl to debug Kubernetes nodes
Get more information about Kubernetes auditing
Use telepresence to develop and debug services locally

1 - Troubleshooting kubectl

This documentation is about investigating and diagnosing kubectl related issues. If you encounter issues accessing kubectl or connecting to your cluster, this document outlines various common scenarios and potential solutions to help identify and address the likely cause.

Before you begin

You need to have a Kubernetes cluster.
You also need to have kubectl installed - see install tools

Verify kubectl setup

Make sure you have installed and configured kubectl correctly on your local machine. Check the kubectl version to ensure it is up-to-date and compatible with your cluster.

Check kubectl version:

kubectl version

You'll see a similar output:

Client Version: version.Info{Major:"1", Minor:"27", GitVersion:"v1.27.4",GitCommit:"fa3d7990104d7c1f16943a67f11b154b71f6a132", GitTreeState:"clean",BuildDate:"2023-07-19T12:20:54Z", GoVersion:"go1.20.6", Compiler:"gc", Platform:"linux/amd64"}
Kustomize Version: v5.0.1
Server Version: version.Info{Major:"1", Minor:"27", GitVersion:"v1.27.3",GitCommit:"25b4e43193bcda6c7328a6d147b1fb73a33f1598", GitTreeState:"clean",BuildDate:"2023-06-14T09:47:40Z", GoVersion:"go1.20.5", Compiler:"gc", Platform:"linux/amd64"}

If you see Unable to connect to the server: dial tcp <server-ip>:8443: i/o timeout, instead of Server Version, you need to troubleshoot kubectl connectivity with your cluster.

Make sure you have installed the kubectl by following the official documentation for installing kubectl, and you have properly configured the $PATH environment variable.

Check kubeconfig

The kubectl requires a kubeconfig file to connect to a Kubernetes cluster. The kubeconfig file is usually located under the ~/.kube/config directory. Make sure that you have a valid kubeconfig file. If you don't have a kubeconfig file, you can obtain it from your Kubernetes administrator, or you can copy it from your Kubernetes control plane's /etc/kubernetes/admin.conf directory. If you have deployed your Kubernetes cluster on a cloud platform and lost your kubeconfig file, you can re-generate it using your cloud provider's tools. Refer the cloud provider's documentation for re-generating a kubeconfig file.

Check if the $KUBECONFIG environment variable is configured correctly. You can set $KUBECONFIGenvironment variable or use the --kubeconfig parameter with the kubectl to specify the directory of a kubeconfig file.

Check VPN connectivity

If you are using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to access your Kubernetes cluster, make sure that your VPN connection is active and stable. Sometimes, VPN disconnections can lead to connection issues with the cluster. Reconnect to the VPN and try accessing the cluster again.

Authentication and authorization

If you are using the token based authentication and the kubectl is returning an error regarding the authentication token or authentication server address, validate the Kubernetes authentication token and the authentication server address are configured properly.

If kubectl is returning an error regarding the authorization, make sure that you are using the valid user credentials. And you have the permission to access the resource that you have requested.

Verify contexts

Kubernetes supports multiple clusters and contexts. Ensure that you are using the correct context to interact with your cluster.

List available contexts:

kubectl config get-contexts

Switch to the appropriate context:

kubectl config use-context <context-name>

API server and load balancer

The kube-apiserver server is the central component of a Kubernetes cluster. If the API server or the load balancer that runs in front of your API servers is not reachable or not responding, you won't be able to interact with the cluster.

Check the if the API server's host is reachable by using ping command. Check cluster's network connectivity and firewall. If your are using a cloud provider for deploying the cluster, check your cloud provider's health check status for the cluster's API server.

Verify the status of the load balancer (if used) to ensure it is healthy and forwarding traffic to the API server.

TLS problems

Additional tools required - base64 and openssl version 3.0 or above.

The Kubernetes API server only serves HTTPS requests by default. In that case TLS problems may occur due to various reasons, such as certificate expiry or chain of trust validity.

You can find the TLS certificate in the kubeconfig file, located in the ~/.kube/config directory. The certificate-authority attribute contains the CA certificate and the client-certificate attribute contains the client certificate.

Verify the expiry of these certificates:

kubectl config view --flatten --output 'jsonpath={.clusters[0].cluster.certificate-authority-data}' | base64 -d | openssl x509 -noout -dates

output:

notBefore=Feb 13 05:57:47 2024 GMT
notAfter=Feb 10 06:02:47 2034 GMT

kubectl config view --flatten --output 'jsonpath={.users[0].user.client-certificate-data}'| base64 -d | openssl x509 -noout -dates

output:

notBefore=Feb 13 05:57:47 2024 GMT
notAfter=Feb 12 06:02:50 2025 GMT

Verify kubectl helpers

Some kubectl authentication helpers provide easy access to Kubernetes clusters. If you have used such helpers and are facing connectivity issues, ensure that the necessary configurations are still present.

Check kubectl configuration for authentication details:

kubectl config view

If you previously used a helper tool (for example, kubectl-oidc-login), ensure that it is still installed and configured correctly.

2 - Resource metrics pipeline

For Kubernetes, the Metrics API offers a basic set of metrics to support automatic scaling and similar use cases. This API makes information available about resource usage for node and pod, including metrics for CPU and memory. If you deploy the Metrics API into your cluster, clients of the Kubernetes API can then query for this information, and you can use Kubernetes' access control mechanisms to manage permissions to do so.

The HorizontalPodAutoscaler (HPA) and VerticalPodAutoscaler (VPA) use data from the metrics API to adjust workload replicas and resources to meet customer demand.

You can also view the resource metrics using the kubectl top command.

Note:

The Metrics API, and the metrics pipeline that it enables, only offers the minimum CPU and memory metrics to enable automatic scaling using HPA and / or VPA. If you would like to provide a more complete set of metrics, you can complement the simpler Metrics API by deploying a second metrics pipeline that uses the Custom Metrics API.

Figure 1 illustrates the architecture of the resource metrics pipeline.

flowchart RL subgraph cluster[Cluster] direction RL S[

] A[Metrics-
Server] subgraph B[Nodes] direction TB D[cAdvisor] --> C[kubelet] E[Container
runtime] --> D E1[Container
runtime] --> D P[pod data] -.- C end L[API
server] W[HPA] C ---->|node level
resource metrics| A -->|metrics
API| L --> W end L ---> K[kubectl
top] classDef box fill:#fff,stroke:#000,stroke-width:1px,color:#000; class W,B,P,K,cluster,D,E,E1 box classDef spacewhite fill:#ffffff,stroke:#fff,stroke-width:0px,color:#000 class S spacewhite classDef k8s fill:#326ce5,stroke:#fff,stroke-width:1px,color:#fff; class A,L,C k8s

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Figure 1. Resource Metrics Pipeline

The architecture components, from right to left in the figure, consist of the following:

cAdvisor: Daemon for collecting, aggregating and exposing container metrics included in Kubelet.
kubelet: Node agent for managing container resources. Resource metrics are accessible using the /metrics/resource and /stats kubelet API endpoints.
node level resource metrics: API provided by the kubelet for discovering and retrieving per-node summarized stats available through the /metrics/resource endpoint.
metrics-server: Cluster addon component that collects and aggregates resource metrics pulled from each kubelet. The API server serves Metrics API for use by HPA, VPA, and by the kubectl top command. Metrics Server is a reference implementation of the Metrics API.
Metrics API: Kubernetes API supporting access to CPU and memory used for workload autoscaling. To make this work in your cluster, you need an API extension server that provides the Metrics API.

Note:
cAdvisor supports reading metrics from cgroups, which works with typical container runtimes on Linux. If you use a container runtime that uses another resource isolation mechanism, for example virtualization, then that container runtime must support CRI Container Metrics in order for metrics to be available to the kubelet.

Metrics API

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes 1.8 [beta]

The metrics-server implements the Metrics API. This API allows you to access CPU and memory usage for the nodes and pods in your cluster. Its primary role is to feed resource usage metrics to K8s autoscaler components.

Here is an example of the Metrics API request for a minikube node piped through jq for easier reading:

kubectl get --raw "/apis/metrics.k8s.io/v1beta1/nodes/minikube" | jq '.'

Here is the same API call using curl:

curl http://localhost:8080/apis/metrics.k8s.io/v1beta1/nodes/minikube

Sample response:

{
  "kind": "NodeMetrics",
  "apiVersion": "metrics.k8s.io/v1beta1",
  "metadata": {
    "name": "minikube",
    "selfLink": "/apis/metrics.k8s.io/v1beta1/nodes/minikube",
    "creationTimestamp": "2022-01-27T18:48:43Z"
  },
  "timestamp": "2022-01-27T18:48:33Z",
  "window": "30s",
  "usage": {
    "cpu": "487558164n",
    "memory": "732212Ki"
  }
}

Here is an example of the Metrics API request for a kube-scheduler-minikube pod contained in the kube-system namespace and piped through jq for easier reading:

kubectl get --raw "/apis/metrics.k8s.io/v1beta1/namespaces/kube-system/pods/kube-scheduler-minikube" | jq '.'

Here is the same API call using curl:

curl http://localhost:8080/apis/metrics.k8s.io/v1beta1/namespaces/kube-system/pods/kube-scheduler-minikube

Sample response:

{
  "kind": "PodMetrics",
  "apiVersion": "metrics.k8s.io/v1beta1",
  "metadata": {
    "name": "kube-scheduler-minikube",
    "namespace": "kube-system",
    "selfLink": "/apis/metrics.k8s.io/v1beta1/namespaces/kube-system/pods/kube-scheduler-minikube",
    "creationTimestamp": "2022-01-27T19:25:00Z"
  },
  "timestamp": "2022-01-27T19:24:31Z",
  "window": "30s",
  "containers": [
    {
      "name": "kube-scheduler",
      "usage": {
        "cpu": "9559630n",
        "memory": "22244Ki"
      }
    }
  ]
}

The Metrics API is defined in the k8s.io/metrics repository. You must enable the API aggregation layer and register an APIService for the metrics.k8s.io API.

To learn more about the Metrics API, see resource metrics API design, the metrics-server repository and the resource metrics API.

Note:

You must deploy the metrics-server or alternative adapter that serves the Metrics API to be able to access it.

Measuring resource usage

CPU

CPU is reported as the average core usage measured in cpu units. One cpu, in Kubernetes, is equivalent to 1 vCPU/Core for cloud providers, and 1 hyper-thread on bare-metal Intel processors.

This value is derived by taking a rate over a cumulative CPU counter provided by the kernel (in both Linux and Windows kernels). The time window used to calculate CPU is shown under window field in Metrics API.

To learn more about how Kubernetes allocates and measures CPU resources, see meaning of CPU.

Memory

Memory is reported as the working set, measured in bytes, at the instant the metric was collected.

In an ideal world, the "working set" is the amount of memory in-use that cannot be freed under memory pressure. However, calculation of the working set varies by host OS, and generally makes heavy use of heuristics to produce an estimate.

The Kubernetes model for a container's working set expects that the container runtime counts anonymous memory associated with the container in question. The working set metric typically also includes some cached (file-backed) memory, because the host OS cannot always reclaim pages.

To learn more about how Kubernetes allocates and measures memory resources, see meaning of memory.

Metrics Server

The metrics-server fetches resource metrics from the kubelets and exposes them in the Kubernetes API server through the Metrics API for use by the HPA and VPA. You can also view these metrics using the kubectl top command.

The metrics-server uses the Kubernetes API to track nodes and pods in your cluster. The metrics-server queries each node over HTTP to fetch metrics. The metrics-server also builds an internal view of pod metadata, and keeps a cache of pod health. That cached pod health information is available via the extension API that the metrics-server makes available.

For example with an HPA query, the metrics-server needs to identify which pods fulfill the label selectors in the deployment.

The metrics-server calls the kubelet API to collect metrics from each node. Depending on the metrics-server version it uses:

Metrics resource endpoint /metrics/resource in version v0.6.0+ or
Summary API endpoint /stats/summary in older versions

What's next

To learn more about the metrics-server, see the metrics-server repository.

You can also check out the following:

To learn about how the kubelet serves node metrics, and how you can access those via the Kubernetes API, read Node Metrics Data.

3 - Tools for Monitoring Resources

To scale an application and provide a reliable service, you need to understand how the application behaves when it is deployed. You can examine application performance in a Kubernetes cluster by examining the containers, pods, services, and the characteristics of the overall cluster. Kubernetes provides detailed information about an application's resource usage at each of these levels. This information allows you to evaluate your application's performance and where bottlenecks can be removed to improve overall performance.

In Kubernetes, application monitoring does not depend on a single monitoring solution. On new clusters, you can use resource metrics or full metrics pipelines to collect monitoring statistics.

Resource metrics pipeline

The resource metrics pipeline provides a limited set of metrics related to cluster components such as the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler controller, as well as the kubectl top utility. These metrics are collected by the lightweight, short-term, in-memory metrics-server and are exposed via the metrics.k8s.io API.

metrics-server discovers all nodes on the cluster and queries each node's kubelet for CPU and memory usage. The kubelet acts as a bridge between the Kubernetes master and the nodes, managing the pods and containers running on a machine. The kubelet translates each pod into its constituent containers and fetches individual container usage statistics from the container runtime through the container runtime interface. If you use a container runtime that uses Linux cgroups and namespaces to implement containers, and the container runtime does not publish usage statistics, then the kubelet can look up those statistics directly (using code from cAdvisor). No matter how those statistics arrive, the kubelet then exposes the aggregated pod resource usage statistics through the metrics-server Resource Metrics API. This API is served at /metrics/resource/v1beta1 on the kubelet's authenticated and read-only ports.

Full metrics pipeline

A full metrics pipeline gives you access to richer metrics. Kubernetes can respond to these metrics by automatically scaling or adapting the cluster based on its current state, using mechanisms such as the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler. The monitoring pipeline fetches metrics from the kubelet and then exposes them to Kubernetes via an adapter by implementing either the custom.metrics.k8s.io or external.metrics.k8s.io API.

Kubernetes is designed to work with OpenMetrics, which is one of the CNCF Observability and Analysis - Monitoring Projects, built upon and carefully extending Prometheus exposition format in almost 100% backwards-compatible ways.

If you glance over at the CNCF Landscape, you can see a number of monitoring projects that can work with Kubernetes by scraping metric data and using that to help you observe your cluster. It is up to you to select the tool or tools that suit your needs. The CNCF landscape for observability and analytics includes a mix of open-source software, paid-for software-as-a-service, and other commercial products.

When you design and implement a full metrics pipeline you can make that monitoring data available back to Kubernetes. For example, a HorizontalPodAutoscaler can use the processed metrics to work out how many Pods to run for a component of your workload.

Integration of a full metrics pipeline into your Kubernetes implementation is outside the scope of Kubernetes documentation because of the very wide scope of possible solutions.

The choice of monitoring platform depends heavily on your needs, budget, and technical resources. Kubernetes does not recommend any specific metrics pipeline; many options are available. Your monitoring system should be capable of handling the OpenMetrics metrics transmission standard and needs to be chosen to best fit into your overall design and deployment of your infrastructure platform.

What's next

Learn about additional debugging tools, including:

4 - Monitor Node Health

Node Problem Detector is a daemon for monitoring and reporting about a node's health. You can run Node Problem Detector as a DaemonSet or as a standalone daemon. Node Problem Detector collects information about node problems from various daemons and reports these conditions to the API server as Node Conditions or as Events.

To learn how to install and use Node Problem Detector, see Node Problem Detector project documentation.

Before you begin

You need to have a Kubernetes cluster, and the kubectl command-line tool must be configured to communicate with your cluster. It is recommended to run this tutorial on a cluster with at least two nodes that are not acting as control plane hosts. If you do not already have a cluster, you can create one by using minikube or you can use one of these Kubernetes playgrounds:

Limitations

Node Problem Detector uses the kernel log format for reporting kernel issues. To learn how to extend the kernel log format, see Add support for another log format.

Enabling Node Problem Detector

Some cloud providers enable Node Problem Detector as an Addon. You can also enable Node Problem Detector with kubectl or by creating an Addon DaemonSet.

Using kubectl to enable Node Problem Detector

kubectl provides the most flexible management of Node Problem Detector. You can overwrite the default configuration to fit it into your environment or to detect customized node problems. For example:

Create a Node Problem Detector configuration similar to node-problem-detector.yaml:

debug/node-problem-detector.yaml

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: DaemonSet
metadata:
  name: node-problem-detector-v0.1
  namespace: kube-system
  labels:
    k8s-app: node-problem-detector
    version: v0.1
    kubernetes.io/cluster-service: "true"
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      k8s-app: node-problem-detector  
      version: v0.1
      kubernetes.io/cluster-service: "true"
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        k8s-app: node-problem-detector
        version: v0.1
        kubernetes.io/cluster-service: "true"
    spec:
      hostNetwork: true
      containers:
      - name: node-problem-detector
        image: registry.k8s.io/node-problem-detector:v0.1
        securityContext:
          privileged: true
        resources:
          limits:
            cpu: "200m"
            memory: "100Mi"
          requests:
            cpu: "20m"
            memory: "20Mi"
        volumeMounts:
        - name: log
          mountPath: /log
          readOnly: true
      volumes:
      - name: log
        hostPath:
          path: /var/log/

Note:

You should verify that the system log directory is right for your operating system distribution.

Start node problem detector with kubectl:

kubectl apply -f https://k8s.io/examples/debug/node-problem-detector.yaml

Using an Addon pod to enable Node Problem Detector

If you are using a custom cluster bootstrap solution and don't need to overwrite the default configuration, you can leverage the Addon pod to further automate the deployment.

Create node-problem-detector.yaml, and save the configuration in the Addon pod's directory /etc/kubernetes/addons/node-problem-detector on a control plane node.

Overwrite the configuration

The default configuration is embedded when building the Docker image of Node Problem Detector.

However, you can use a ConfigMap to overwrite the configuration:

Change the configuration files in config/

Create the ConfigMap node-problem-detector-config:

kubectl create configmap node-problem-detector-config --from-file=config/

Change the node-problem-detector.yaml to use the ConfigMap:

debug/node-problem-detector-configmap.yaml

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: DaemonSet
metadata:
  name: node-problem-detector-v0.1
  namespace: kube-system
  labels:
    k8s-app: node-problem-detector
    version: v0.1
    kubernetes.io/cluster-service: "true"
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      k8s-app: node-problem-detector  
      version: v0.1
      kubernetes.io/cluster-service: "true"
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        k8s-app: node-problem-detector
        version: v0.1
        kubernetes.io/cluster-service: "true"
    spec:
      hostNetwork: true
      containers:
      - name: node-problem-detector
        image: registry.k8s.io/node-problem-detector:v0.1
        securityContext:
          privileged: true
        resources:
          limits:
            cpu: "200m"
            memory: "100Mi"
          requests:
            cpu: "20m"
            memory: "20Mi"
        volumeMounts:
        - name: log
          mountPath: /log
          readOnly: true
        - name: config # Overwrite the config/ directory with ConfigMap volume
          mountPath: /config
          readOnly: true
      volumes:
      - name: log
        hostPath:
          path: /var/log/
      - name: config # Define ConfigMap volume
        configMap:
          name: node-problem-detector-config

Recreate the Node Problem Detector with the new configuration file:

# If you have a node-problem-detector running, delete before recreating
kubectl delete -f https://k8s.io/examples/debug/node-problem-detector.yaml
kubectl apply -f https://k8s.io/examples/debug/node-problem-detector-configmap.yaml

Note:

This approach only applies to a Node Problem Detector started with kubectl.

Overwriting a configuration is not supported if a Node Problem Detector runs as a cluster Addon. The Addon manager does not support ConfigMap.

Problem Daemons

A problem daemon is a sub-daemon of the Node Problem Detector. It monitors specific kinds of node problems and reports them to the Node Problem Detector. There are several types of supported problem daemons.

A SystemLogMonitor type of daemon monitors the system logs and reports problems and metrics according to predefined rules. You can customize the configurations for different log sources such as filelog, kmsg, kernel, abrt, and systemd.
A SystemStatsMonitor type of daemon collects various health-related system stats as metrics. You can customize its behavior by updating its configuration file.
A CustomPluginMonitor type of daemon invokes and checks various node problems by running user-defined scripts. You can use different custom plugin monitors to monitor different problems and customize the daemon behavior by updating the configuration file.
A HealthChecker type of daemon checks the health of the kubelet and container runtime on a node.

Adding support for other log format

The system log monitor currently supports file-based logs, journald, and kmsg. Additional sources can be added by implementing a new log watcher.

Adding custom plugin monitors

You can extend the Node Problem Detector to execute any monitor scripts written in any language by developing a custom plugin. The monitor scripts must conform to the plugin protocol in exit code and standard output. For more information, please refer to the plugin interface proposal.

Exporter

An exporter reports the node problems and/or metrics to certain backends. The following exporters are supported:

Kubernetes exporter: this exporter reports node problems to the Kubernetes API server. Temporary problems are reported as Events and permanent problems are reported as Node Conditions.
Prometheus exporter: this exporter reports node problems and metrics locally as Prometheus (or OpenMetrics) metrics. You can specify the IP address and port for the exporter using command line arguments.
Stackdriver exporter: this exporter reports node problems and metrics to the Stackdriver Monitoring API. The exporting behavior can be customized using a configuration file.

Recommendations and restrictions

It is recommended to run the Node Problem Detector in your cluster to monitor node health. When running the Node Problem Detector, you can expect extra resource overhead on each node. Usually this is fine, because:

The kernel log grows relatively slowly.
A resource limit is set for the Node Problem Detector.
Even under high load, the resource usage is acceptable. For more information, see the Node Problem Detector benchmark result.

5 - Debugging Kubernetes nodes with crictl

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.11 [stable]

crictl is a command-line interface for CRI-compatible container runtimes. You can use it to inspect and debug container runtimes and applications on a Kubernetes node. crictl and its source are hosted in the cri-tools repository.

Before you begin

crictl requires a Linux operating system with a CRI runtime.

Installing crictl

You can download a compressed archive crictl from the cri-tools release page, for several different architectures. Download the version that corresponds to your version of Kubernetes. Extract it and move it to a location on your system path, such as /usr/local/bin/.

General usage

The crictl command has several subcommands and runtime flags. Use crictl help or crictl <subcommand> help for more details.

You can set the endpoint for crictl by doing one of the following:

Set the --runtime-endpoint and --image-endpoint flags.
Set the CONTAINER_RUNTIME_ENDPOINT and IMAGE_SERVICE_ENDPOINT environment variables.
Set the endpoint in the configuration file /etc/crictl.yaml. To specify a different file, use the --config=PATH_TO_FILE flag when you run crictl.

Note:

If you don't set an endpoint, crictl attempts to connect to a list of known endpoints, which might result in an impact to performance.

You can also specify timeout values when connecting to the server and enable or disable debugging, by specifying timeout or debug values in the configuration file or using the --timeout and --debug command-line flags.

To view or edit the current configuration, view or edit the contents of /etc/crictl.yaml. For example, the configuration when using the containerd container runtime would be similar to this:

runtime-endpoint: unix:///var/run/containerd/containerd.sock
image-endpoint: unix:///var/run/containerd/containerd.sock
timeout: 10
debug: true

To learn more about crictl, refer to the crictl documentation.

Example crictl commands

The following examples show some crictl commands and example output.