A pod fails, and the next ten minutes go to finding out why. At Demuxer we build Kuberniq, a desktop Kubernetes client for macOS and Windows, and this article shows how it takes you from the failure to the log and to a shell in a container.

The problem

In a terminal, you find the pod with kubectl get pods -n shop, copy its name with the random suffix, run kubectl logs worker-6c8d9b7f4-qz8mt --previous to see why the last run ended, and then kubectl exec -it api-7d9f8c6b5d-m4h7c -c api -- sh to look from inside a neighbour pod. Every step needs the exact name of a pod that may already have been replaced.

How Kuberniq does it

The Logs tool window of Kuberniq on the pod worker-6c8d9b7f4-qz8mt in CrashLoopBackOff, ending at level=fatal

  1. When a pod fails, Kuberniq shows a notification. In our demo cluster it reads "The pod worker-6c8d9b7f4-qz8mt failed", with a View log button.
  2. View log opens the Logs tool window on that pod. The screenshot shows worker-6c8d9b7f4-qz8mt in CrashLoopBackOff, and its log: three attempts to reach rabbitmq.shop.svc.cluster.local, then level=fatal msg="cannot consume the queue without a broker". The toolbar follows the end of the log, wraps long lines, shows timestamps and downloads the log.
  3. To look from inside another pod, open Pods, type api- in the filter, right-click api-7d9f8c6b5d-m4h7c and choose Open Terminal. The Terminal tool window opens a shell in the container api, at /app #.

The Pods table also shows the CPU and memory of each pod and how they compare with its requests and limits, so a pod near its memory limit stands out before you open anything.

What it doesn't do yet

Kuberniq shows the log the cluster still keeps for the container. When the pod is deleted, its log goes with it, and Kuberniq doesn't store logs anywhere of its own or search across them over time. There's also no Linux build; it runs on macOS and Windows.

Try it

The free license covers personal projects, study, teaching and open source, with the whole app and no account. If you debug pods from the terminal today, we'd like to know which step you'd still do there after trying Kuberniq.

Download Kuberniq from its page: https://demuxer.dev/kuberniq?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=kuberniq-desktop&utm_content=dev-to%2Flogs-terminal