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Troubleshooting Clusters

Debugging common cluster issues.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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:

  1. Create a Node Problem Detector configuration similar to 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/
  2. 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:

  1. Change the configuration files in config/

  2. Create the ConfigMap node-problem-detector-config:

    kubectl create configmap node-problem-detector-config --from-file=config/
    
  3. Change the node-problem-detector.yaml to use the ConfigMap:

    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
  4. 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
    

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.

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.

List pods

List all pods:

crictl pods

The output is similar to this:

POD ID              CREATED              STATE               NAME                         NAMESPACE           ATTEMPT
926f1b5a1d33a       About a minute ago   Ready               sh-84d7dcf559-4r2gq          default             0
4dccb216c4adb       About a minute ago   Ready               nginx-65899c769f-wv2gp       default             0
a86316e96fa89       17 hours ago         Ready               kube-proxy-gblk4             kube-system         0
919630b8f81f1       17 hours ago         Ready               nvidia-device-plugin-zgbbv   kube-system         0

List pods by name:

crictl pods --name nginx-65899c769f-wv2gp

The output is similar to this:

POD ID              CREATED             STATE               NAME                     NAMESPACE           ATTEMPT
4dccb216c4adb       2 minutes ago       Ready               nginx-65899c769f-wv2gp   default             0

List pods by label:

crictl pods --label run=nginx

The output is similar to this:

POD ID              CREATED             STATE               NAME                     NAMESPACE           ATTEMPT
4dccb216c4adb       2 minutes ago       Ready               nginx-65899c769f-wv2gp   default             0

List images

List all images:

crictl images

The output is similar to this:

IMAGE                                     TAG                 IMAGE ID            SIZE
busybox                                   latest              8c811b4aec35f       1.15MB
k8s-gcrio.azureedge.net/hyperkube-amd64   v1.10.3             e179bbfe5d238       665MB
k8s-gcrio.azureedge.net/pause-amd64       3.1                 da86e6ba6ca19       742kB
nginx                                     latest              cd5239a0906a6       109MB

List images by repository:

crictl images nginx

The output is similar to this:

IMAGE               TAG                 IMAGE ID            SIZE
nginx               latest              cd5239a0906a6       109MB

Only list image IDs:

crictl images -q

The output is similar to this:

sha256:8c811b4aec35f259572d0f79207bc0678df4c736eeec50bc9fec37ed936a472a
sha256:e179bbfe5d238de6069f3b03fccbecc3fb4f2019af741bfff1233c4d7b2970c5
sha256:da86e6ba6ca197bf6bc5e9d900febd906b133eaa4750e6bed647b0fbe50ed43e
sha256:cd5239a0906a6ccf0562354852fae04bc5b52d72a2aff9a871ddb6bd57553569

List containers

List all containers:

crictl ps -a

The output is similar to this:

CONTAINER ID        IMAGE                                                                                                             CREATED             STATE               NAME                       ATTEMPT
1f73f2d81bf98       busybox@sha256:141c253bc4c3fd0a201d32dc1f493bcf3fff003b6df416dea4f41046e0f37d47                                   7 minutes ago       Running             sh                         1
9c5951df22c78       busybox@sha256:141c253bc4c3fd0a201d32dc1f493bcf3fff003b6df416dea4f41046e0f37d47                                   8 minutes ago       Exited              sh                         0
87d3992f84f74       nginx@sha256:d0a8828cccb73397acb0073bf34f4d7d8aa315263f1e7806bf8c55d8ac139d5f                                     8 minutes ago       Running             nginx                      0
1941fb4da154f       k8s-gcrio.azureedge.net/hyperkube-amd64@sha256:00d814b1f7763f4ab5be80c58e98140dfc69df107f253d7fdd714b30a714260a   18 hours ago        Running             kube-proxy                 0

List running containers:

crictl ps

The output is similar to this:

CONTAINER ID        IMAGE                                                                                                             CREATED             STATE               NAME                       ATTEMPT
1f73f2d81bf98       busybox@sha256:141c253bc4c3fd0a201d32dc1f493bcf3fff003b6df416dea4f41046e0f37d47                                   6 minutes ago       Running             sh                         1
87d3992f84f74       nginx@sha256:d0a8828cccb73397acb0073bf34f4d7d8aa315263f1e7806bf8c55d8ac139d5f                                     7 minutes ago       Running             nginx                      0
1941fb4da154f       k8s-gcrio.azureedge.net/hyperkube-amd64@sha256:00d814b1f7763f4ab5be80c58e98140dfc69df107f253d7fdd714b30a714260a   17 hours ago        Running             kube-proxy                 0

Execute a command in a running container

crictl exec -i -t 1f73f2d81bf98 ls

The output is similar to this:

bin   dev   etc   home  proc  root  sys   tmp   usr   var

Get a container's logs

Get all container logs:

crictl logs 87d3992f84f74

The output is similar to this:

10.240.0.96 - - [06/Jun/2018:02:45:49 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 612 "-" "curl/7.47.0" "-"
10.240.0.96 - - [06/Jun/2018:02:45:50 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 612 "-" "curl/7.47.0" "-"
10.240.0.96 - - [06/Jun/2018:02:45:51 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 612 "-" "curl/7.47.0" "-"

Get only the latest N lines of logs:

crictl logs --tail=1 87d3992f84f74

The output is similar to this:

10.240.0.96 - - [06/Jun/2018:02:45:51 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 612 "-" "curl/7.47.0" "-"

What's next

6 - Auditing

Kubernetes auditing provides a security-relevant, chronological set of records documenting the sequence of actions in a cluster. The cluster audits the activities generated by users, by applications that use the Kubernetes API, and by the control plane itself.

Auditing allows cluster administrators to answer the following questions:

  • what happened?
  • when did it happen?
  • who initiated it?
  • on what did it happen?
  • where was it observed?
  • from where was it initiated?
  • to where was it going?

Audit records begin their lifecycle inside the kube-apiserver component. Each request on each stage of its execution generates an audit event, which is then pre-processed according to a certain policy and written to a backend. The policy determines what's recorded and the backends persist the records. The current backend implementations include logs files and webhooks.

Each request can be recorded with an associated stage. The defined stages are:

  • RequestReceived - The stage for events generated as soon as the audit handler receives the request, and before it is delegated down the handler chain.
  • ResponseStarted - Once the response headers are sent, but before the response body is sent. This stage is only generated for long-running requests (e.g. watch).
  • ResponseComplete - The response body has been completed and no more bytes will be sent.
  • Panic - Events generated when a panic occurred.

The audit logging feature increases the memory consumption of the API server because some context required for auditing is stored for each request. Memory consumption depends on the audit logging configuration.

Audit policy

Audit policy defines rules about what events should be recorded and what data they should include. The audit policy object structure is defined in the audit.k8s.io API group. When an event is processed, it's compared against the list of rules in order. The first matching rule sets the audit level of the event. The defined audit levels are:

  • None - don't log events that match this rule.
  • Metadata - log request metadata (requesting user, timestamp, resource, verb, etc.) but not request or response body.
  • Request - log event metadata and request body but not response body. This does not apply for non-resource requests.
  • RequestResponse - log event metadata, request and response bodies. This does not apply for non-resource requests.

You can pass a file with the policy to kube-apiserver using the --audit-policy-file flag. If the flag is omitted, no events are logged. Note that the rules field must be provided in the audit policy file. A policy with no (0) rules is treated as illegal.

Below is an example audit policy file:

apiVersion: audit.k8s.io/v1 # This is required.
kind: Policy
# Don't generate audit events for all requests in RequestReceived stage.
omitStages:
  - "RequestReceived"
rules:
  # Log pod changes at RequestResponse level
  - level: RequestResponse
    resources:
    - group: ""
      # Resource "pods" doesn't match requests to any subresource of pods,
      # which is consistent with the RBAC policy.
      resources: ["pods"]
  # Log "pods/log", "pods/status" at Metadata level
  - level: Metadata
    resources:
    - group: ""
      resources: ["pods/log", "pods/status"]

  # Don't log requests to a configmap called "controller-leader"
  - level: None
    resources:
    - group: ""
      resources: ["configmaps"]
      resourceNames: ["controller-leader"]

  # Don't log watch requests by the "system:kube-proxy" on endpoints or services
  - level: None
    users: ["system:kube-proxy"]
    verbs: ["watch"]
    resources:
    - group: "" # core API group
      resources: ["endpoints", "services"]

  # Don't log authenticated requests to certain non-resource URL paths.
  - level: None
    userGroups: ["system:authenticated"]
    nonResourceURLs:
    - "/api*" # Wildcard matching.
    - "/version"

  # Log the request body of configmap changes in kube-system.
  - level: Request
    resources:
    - group: "" # core API group
      resources: ["configmaps"]
    # This rule only applies to resources in the "kube-system" namespace.
    # The empty string "" can be used to select non-namespaced resources.
    namespaces: ["kube-system"]

  # Log configmap and secret changes in all other namespaces at the Metadata level.
  - level: Metadata
    resources:
    - group: "" # core API group
      resources: ["secrets", "configmaps"]

  # Log all other resources in core and extensions at the Request level.
  - level: Request
    resources:
    - group: "" # core API group
    - group: "extensions" # Version of group should NOT be included.

  # A catch-all rule to log all other requests at the Metadata level.
  - level: Metadata
    # Long-running requests like watches that fall under this rule will not
    # generate an audit event in RequestReceived.
    omitStages:
      - "RequestReceived"

You can use a minimal audit policy file to log all requests at the Metadata level:

# Log all requests at the Metadata level.
apiVersion: audit.k8s.io/v1
kind: Policy
rules:
- level: Metadata

If you're crafting your own audit profile, you can use the audit profile for Google Container-Optimized OS as a starting point. You can check the configure-helper.sh script, which generates an audit policy file. You can see most of the audit policy file by looking directly at the script.

You can also refer to the Policy configuration reference for details about the fields defined.

Audit backends

Audit backends persist audit events to an external storage. Out of the box, the kube-apiserver provides two backends:

  • Log backend, which writes events into the filesystem
  • Webhook backend, which sends events to an external HTTP API

In all cases, audit events follow a structure defined by the Kubernetes API in the audit.k8s.io API group.

Log backend

The log backend writes audit events to a file in JSONlines format. You can configure the log audit backend using the following kube-apiserver flags:

  • --audit-log-path specifies the log file path that log backend uses to write audit events. Not specifying this flag disables log backend. - means standard out
  • --audit-log-maxage defined the maximum number of days to retain old audit log files
  • --audit-log-maxbackup defines the maximum number of audit log files to retain
  • --audit-log-maxsize defines the maximum size in megabytes of the audit log file before it gets rotated

If your cluster's control plane runs the kube-apiserver as a Pod, remember to mount the hostPath to the location of the policy file and log file, so that audit records are persisted. For example:

  - --audit-policy-file=/etc/kubernetes/audit-policy.yaml
  - --audit-log-path=/var/log/kubernetes/audit/audit.log

then mount the volumes:

...
volumeMounts:
  - mountPath: /etc/kubernetes/audit-policy.yaml
    name: audit
    readOnly: true
  - mountPath: /var/log/kubernetes/audit/
    name: audit-log
    readOnly: false

and finally configure the hostPath:

...
volumes:
- name: audit
  hostPath:
    path: /etc/kubernetes/audit-policy.yaml
    type: File

- name: audit-log
  hostPath:
    path: /var/log/kubernetes/audit/
    type: DirectoryOrCreate

Webhook backend

The webhook audit backend sends audit events to a remote web API, which is assumed to be a form of the Kubernetes API, including means of authentication. You can configure a webhook audit backend using the following kube-apiserver flags:

  • --audit-webhook-config-file specifies the path to a file with a webhook configuration. The webhook configuration is effectively a specialized kubeconfig.
  • --audit-webhook-initial-backoff specifies the amount of time to wait after the first failed request before retrying. Subsequent requests are retried with exponential backoff.

The webhook config file uses the kubeconfig format to specify the remote address of the service and credentials used to connect to it.

Event batching

Both log and webhook backends support batching. Using webhook as an example, here's the list of available flags. To get the same flag for log backend, replace webhook with log in the flag name. By default, batching is enabled in webhook and disabled in log. Similarly, by default throttling is enabled in webhook and disabled in log.

  • --audit-webhook-mode defines the buffering strategy. One of the following:
    • batch - buffer events and asynchronously process them in batches. This is the default.
    • blocking - block API server responses on processing each individual event.
    • blocking-strict - Same as blocking, but when there is a failure during audit logging at the RequestReceived stage, the whole request to the kube-apiserver fails.

The following flags are used only in the batch mode:

  • --audit-webhook-batch-buffer-size defines the number of events to buffer before batching. If the rate of incoming events overflows the buffer, events are dropped.
  • --audit-webhook-batch-max-size defines the maximum number of events in one batch.
  • --audit-webhook-batch-max-wait defines the maximum amount of time to wait before unconditionally batching events in the queue.
  • --audit-webhook-batch-throttle-qps defines the maximum average number of batches generated per second.
  • --audit-webhook-batch-throttle-burst defines the maximum number of batches generated at the same moment if the allowed QPS was underutilized previously.

Parameter tuning

Parameters should be set to accommodate the load on the API server.

For example, if kube-apiserver receives 100 requests each second, and each request is audited only on ResponseStarted and ResponseComplete stages, you should account for ≅200 audit events being generated each second. Assuming that there are up to 100 events in a batch, you should set throttling level at least 2 queries per second. Assuming that the backend can take up to 5 seconds to write events, you should set the buffer size to hold up to 5 seconds of events; that is: 10 batches, or 1000 events.

In most cases however, the default parameters should be sufficient and you don't have to worry about setting them manually. You can look at the following Prometheus metrics exposed by kube-apiserver and in the logs to monitor the state of the auditing subsystem.

  • apiserver_audit_event_total metric contains the total number of audit events exported.
  • apiserver_audit_error_total metric contains the total number of events dropped due to an error during exporting.

Log entry truncation

Both log and webhook backends support limiting the size of events that are logged. As an example, the following is the list of flags available for the log backend:

  • audit-log-truncate-enabled whether event and batch truncating is enabled.
  • audit-log-truncate-max-batch-size maximum size in bytes of the batch sent to the underlying backend.
  • audit-log-truncate-max-event-size maximum size in bytes of the audit event sent to the underlying backend.

By default truncate is disabled in both webhook and log, a cluster administrator should set audit-log-truncate-enabled or audit-webhook-truncate-enabled to enable the feature.

What's next

7 - Debugging Kubernetes Nodes With Kubectl

This page shows how to debug a node running on the Kubernetes cluster using kubectl debug command.

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:

Your Kubernetes server must be at or later than version 1.2. To check the version, enter kubectl version.

You need to have permission to create Pods and to assign those new Pods to arbitrary nodes. You also need to be authorized to create Pods that access filesystems from the host.

Debugging a Node using kubectl debug node

Use the kubectl debug node command to deploy a Pod to a Node that you want to troubleshoot. This command is helpful in scenarios where you can't access your Node by using an SSH connection. When the Pod is created, the Pod opens an interactive shell on the Node. To create an interactive shell on a Node named “mynode”, run:

kubectl debug node/mynode -it --image=ubuntu
Creating debugging pod node-debugger-mynode-pdx84 with container debugger on node mynode.
If you don't see a command prompt, try pressing enter.
root@mynode:/#

The debug command helps to gather information and troubleshoot issues. Commands that you might use include ip, ifconfig, nc, ping, and ps and so on. You can also install other tools, such as mtr, tcpdump, and curl, from the respective package manager.

The debugging Pod can access the root filesystem of the Node, mounted at /host in the Pod. If you run your kubelet in a filesystem namespace, the debugging Pod sees the root for that namespace, not for the entire node. For a typical Linux node, you can look at the following paths to find relevant logs:

/host/var/log/kubelet.log
Logs from the kubelet, responsible for running containers on the node.
/host/var/log/kube-proxy.log
Logs from kube-proxy, which is responsible for directing traffic to Service endpoints.
/host/var/log/containerd.log
Logs from the containerd process running on the node.
/host/var/log/syslog
Shows general messages and information regarding the system.
/host/var/log/kern.log
Shows kernel logs.

When creating a debugging session on a Node, keep in mind that:

  • kubectl debug automatically generates the name of the new pod, based on the name of the node.
  • The root filesystem of the Node will be mounted at /host.
  • Although the container runs in the host IPC, Network, and PID namespaces, the pod isn't privileged. This means that reading some process information might fail because access to that information is restricted to superusers. For example, chroot /host will fail. If you need a privileged pod, create it manually or use the --profile=sysadmin flag.
  • By applying Debugging Profiles, you can set specific properties such as securityContext to a debugging Pod.

Cleaning up

When you finish using the debugging Pod, delete it:

kubectl get pods
NAME                          READY   STATUS       RESTARTS   AGE
node-debugger-mynode-pdx84    0/1     Completed    0          8m1s
# Change the pod name accordingly
kubectl delete pod node-debugger-mynode-pdx84 --now
pod "node-debugger-mynode-pdx84" deleted

8 - Developing and debugging services locally using telepresence

Kubernetes applications usually consist of multiple, separate services, each running in its own container. Developing and debugging these services on a remote Kubernetes cluster can be cumbersome, requiring you to get a shell on a running container in order to run debugging tools.

telepresence is a tool to ease the process of developing and debugging services locally while proxying the service to a remote Kubernetes cluster. Using telepresence allows you to use custom tools, such as a debugger and IDE, for a local service and provides the service full access to ConfigMap, secrets, and the services running on the remote cluster.

This document describes using telepresence to develop and debug services running on a remote cluster locally.

Before you begin

  • Kubernetes cluster is installed
  • kubectl is configured to communicate with the cluster
  • Telepresence is installed

Connecting your local machine to a remote Kubernetes cluster

After installing telepresence, run telepresence connect to launch its Daemon and connect your local workstation to the cluster.

$ telepresence connect
 
Launching Telepresence Daemon
...
Connected to context default (https://<cluster public IP>)

You can curl services using the Kubernetes syntax e.g. curl -ik https://kubernetes.default

Developing or debugging an existing service

When developing an application on Kubernetes, you typically program or debug a single service. The service might require access to other services for testing and debugging. One option is to use the continuous deployment pipeline, but even the fastest deployment pipeline introduces a delay in the program or debug cycle.

Use the telepresence intercept $SERVICE_NAME --port $LOCAL_PORT:$REMOTE_PORT command to create an "intercept" for rerouting remote service traffic.

Where:

  • $SERVICE_NAME is the name of your local service
  • $LOCAL_PORT is the port that your service is running on your local workstation
  • And $REMOTE_PORT is the port your service listens to in the cluster

Running this command tells Telepresence to send remote traffic to your local service instead of the service in the remote Kubernetes cluster. Make edits to your service source code locally, save, and see the corresponding changes when accessing your remote application take effect immediately. You can also run your local service using a debugger or any other local development tool.

How does Telepresence work?

Telepresence installs a traffic-agent sidecar next to your existing application's container running in the remote cluster. It then captures all traffic requests going into the Pod, and instead of forwarding this to the application in the remote cluster, it routes all traffic (when you create a global intercept or a subset of the traffic (when you create a personal intercept) to your local development environment.

What's next

If you're interested in a hands-on tutorial, check out this tutorial that walks through locally developing the Guestbook application on Google Kubernetes Engine.

For further reading, visit the Telepresence website.

9 - Windows debugging tips

Node-level troubleshooting

  1. My Pods are stuck at "Container Creating" or restarting over and over

    Ensure that your pause image is compatible with your Windows OS version. See Pause container to see the latest / recommended pause image and/or get more information.

  2. My pods show status as ErrImgPull or ImagePullBackOff

    Ensure that your Pod is getting scheduled to a compatible Windows Node.

    More information on how to specify a compatible node for your Pod can be found in this guide.

Network troubleshooting

  1. My Windows Pods do not have network connectivity

    If you are using virtual machines, ensure that MAC spoofing is enabled on all the VM network adapter(s).

  2. My Windows Pods cannot ping external resources

    Windows Pods do not have outbound rules programmed for the ICMP protocol. However, TCP/UDP is supported. When trying to demonstrate connectivity to resources outside of the cluster, substitute ping <IP> with corresponding curl <IP> commands.

    If you are still facing problems, most likely your network configuration in cni.conf deserves some extra attention. You can always edit this static file. The configuration update will apply to any new Kubernetes resources.

    One of the Kubernetes networking requirements (see Kubernetes model) is for cluster communication to occur without NAT internally. To honor this requirement, there is an ExceptionList for all the communication where you do not want outbound NAT to occur. However, this also means that you need to exclude the external IP you are trying to query from the ExceptionList. Only then will the traffic originating from your Windows pods be SNAT'ed correctly to receive a response from the outside world. In this regard, your ExceptionList in cni.conf should look as follows:

    "ExceptionList": [
                    "10.244.0.0/16",  # Cluster subnet
                    "10.96.0.0/12",   # Service subnet
                    "10.127.130.0/24" # Management (host) subnet
                ]
    
  3. My Windows node cannot access NodePort type Services

    Local NodePort access from the node itself fails. This is a known limitation. NodePort access works from other nodes or external clients.

  4. vNICs and HNS endpoints of containers are being deleted

    This issue can be caused when the hostname-override parameter is not passed to kube-proxy. To resolve it, users need to pass the hostname to kube-proxy as follows:

    C:\k\kube-proxy.exe --hostname-override=$(hostname)
    
  5. My Windows node cannot access my services using the service IP

    This is a known limitation of the networking stack on Windows. However, Windows Pods can access the Service IP.

  6. No network adapter is found when starting the kubelet

    The Windows networking stack needs a virtual adapter for Kubernetes networking to work. If the following commands return no results (in an admin shell), virtual network creation — a necessary prerequisite for the kubelet to work — has failed:

    Get-HnsNetwork | ? Name -ieq "cbr0"
    Get-NetAdapter | ? Name -Like "vEthernet (Ethernet*"
    

    Often it is worthwhile to modify the InterfaceName parameter of the start.ps1 script, in cases where the host's network adapter isn't "Ethernet". Otherwise, consult the output of the start-kubelet.ps1 script to see if there are errors during virtual network creation.

  7. DNS resolution is not properly working

    Check the DNS limitations for Windows in this section.

  8. kubectl port-forward fails with "unable to do port forwarding: wincat not found"

    This was implemented in Kubernetes 1.15 by including wincat.exe in the pause infrastructure container mcr.microsoft.com/oss/kubernetes/pause:3.6. Be sure to use a supported version of Kubernetes. If you would like to build your own pause infrastructure container be sure to include wincat.

  9. My Kubernetes installation is failing because my Windows Server node is behind a proxy

    If you are behind a proxy, the following PowerShell environment variables must be defined:

    [Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("HTTP_PROXY", "http://proxy.example.com:80/", [EnvironmentVariableTarget]::Machine)
    [Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("HTTPS_PROXY", "http://proxy.example.com:443/", [EnvironmentVariableTarget]::Machine)
    

Flannel troubleshooting

  1. With Flannel, my nodes are having issues after rejoining a cluster

    Whenever a previously deleted node is being re-joined to the cluster, flannelD tries to assign a new pod subnet to the node. Users should remove the old pod subnet configuration files in the following paths:

    Remove-Item C:\k\SourceVip.json
    Remove-Item C:\k\SourceVipRequest.json
    
  2. Flanneld is stuck in "Waiting for the Network to be created"

    There are numerous reports of this issue; most likely it is a timing issue for when the management IP of the flannel network is set. A workaround is to relaunch start.ps1 or relaunch it manually as follows:

    [Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("NODE_NAME", "<Windows_Worker_Hostname>")
    C:\flannel\flanneld.exe --kubeconfig-file=c:\k\config --iface=<Windows_Worker_Node_IP> --ip-masq=1 --kube-subnet-mgr=1
    
  3. My Windows Pods cannot launch because of missing /run/flannel/subnet.env

    This indicates that Flannel didn't launch correctly. You can either try to restart flanneld.exe or you can copy the files over manually from /run/flannel/subnet.env on the Kubernetes master to C:\run\flannel\subnet.env on the Windows worker node and modify the FLANNEL_SUBNET row to a different number. For example, if node subnet 10.244.4.1/24 is desired:

    FLANNEL_NETWORK=10.244.0.0/16
    FLANNEL_SUBNET=10.244.4.1/24
    FLANNEL_MTU=1500
    FLANNEL_IPMASQ=true
    

Further investigation

If these steps don't resolve your problem, you can get help running Windows containers on Windows nodes in Kubernetes through: