Clusters

Devtron allows you to manage your Kubernetes cluster by:

  • Browsing information of cluster and its resources.

  • Managing the added resources to meet the requirements for high speed and storage capacity.

  • Managing Cluster resources with Kubernetes requests and limits and also individual containers.

  • Debugging a pod or node by connecting to a terminal.

On the left navigation of Devtron, select Clusters. You will find the list of clusters in this section which you have added under Global Configurations > Clusters & Environments.

You can also search the cluster in the Search Clusters bar.

To see the details of resource allocation and usage of the cluster, click the particular cluster.

Resources

On the Resource allocation and usage, you can see the details of compute resources or resources.

  • CPU resources

  • Memory resources

If you specify a request and limits in the container resource manifest file, then the respective values will appear on the Resource allocation and usage section.

Nodes

You can see the list of nodes available in your cluster. Typically you have several nodes in a cluster; in a learning or resource-limited environment, you might have only one node.

The components on a typical node include the kubelet, a container runtime, and the kube-proxy.

If you have multiple nodes, you can search a node by name or label in the search bar.

To display a parameter of a node, use the Columns on the right side, select the parameter you want to display from the drop-down list and click Apply.

Manage Nodes

Your applications run on pods, and pods run on Nodes. But sometimes, Kubernetes scheduler cannot deploy a pod on a Node for several reasons. As an example, node is not ready, node is not reachable, network is unavailable etc.

Using the Devtron UI, you will be able to:

To see the summary of a node, click the specific node.

Debug a Node

You can debug a node via Terminal by selecting your namespace and image from the list that has all CLI utilities like kubectl, helm, netshoot etc. or can use a custom image, which is publicly available.

  • Go to the Clusters section from the left navigation pane.

  • Select your cluster.

  • Search a node by name or label in the search bar.

  • On the node, click the ellipsis button and then click Terminal.

  • Debug a node by selecting the terminal shell bash or sh.

Cordon a Node

Cordoning a node means making the node unschedulable. After cordoning a node, new Pods cannot be scheduled on this node.

  • On the node, click the ellipsis button and then click Cordon.

  • A dialog box with message Cordoning this node will mark this node as unschedulable. By cordoning a node, you can be sure that no new pods will be scheduled on this node is displayed.

  • The status of the node shows SchedulingDisabled with Unschedulable parameter set as true.

Similarly, you can uncordon a node by clicking Uncordon. After a node is uncordoned, new Pods can be scheduled on the node.

Drain a Node

Before performing maintenance on a node, draining a node evicts all of your pods safely from a node. Safe evictions allow the pod’s containers to gracefully terminate and honour the PodDisruptionBudgets you have specified (if relevant).

After the node is drained, all Pods (including those managed by DaemonSets) in the node will be automatically drained to other nodes in the cluster, and the drained node will be set to cordoned status.

  • On the node, click the ellipsis button and then click Drain.

  • A dialog box with message Drain will cordon off the node and evict all pods of the node is displayed.

  • Click Drain Node.

You can also select from the following conditions before draining a node:

Taint a Node

Taints are key:value pairs associated with effect. After you add taints to nodes, you can set tolerations on a pod to allow the pod to be scheduled to nodes with certain taints. When you taint a node, it will repel all the pods except those that have a toleration for that taint. A node can have one or many taints associated with it.

Note: Make sure to check taint validations before you add a taint.

  • On the node, click the ellipsis button and then click Edit taints.

  • Click Add taint.

  • On the Key and Value fields, enter the key:value pairs and select the taint effect from the drop-down list.

  • Click Save.

  • You can also delete the added taint by clicking delete button.

Taint Effects

A taint can produce three possible effects:

Edit a Node Config

Edit node config allows you to directly edit any node. It will open the editor which contains all the configuration settings in which the default format is YAML. You can edit multiple objects, although changes are applied one at a time.

  • You can edit or modify the parameters or values of a node by clicking Edit node config.

  • Click Review Changes to compare the changes in the YAML file.

  • Click Update Node.

Delete a Node

  • Search a node by name or label in the search bar.

  • On the node, click the ellipsis button and then click Delete.

The node will be deleted from the cluster.

Access Cluster via Terminal for Troubleshooting

User with Super admins access can now troubleshoot cluster issues by accessing the cluster terminal from Devtron. You can select an image from the list that has all CLI utilities like kubectl, helm, netshoot etc. or can use a custom image, which is publicly available.

To troubleshoot a cluster or a specific node in a cluster, click the terminal symbol on the right side.

  • You will see the user-defined name for the cluster in Devtron. E.g. default-cluster.

  • In the Nodes field, select the node from the drop-down list you want to troubleshoot. E.g. demo-new.

  • Select the namespace from the drop-down list which you have added in the Environment section.

  • Select the image from the drop-down list which includes all CLI utilities or you can use a custom image, which is publicly available.

  • Select the terminal shell from the drop-down list (e.g. sh, bash) to troubleshoot a node.

One of the Use Cases: Debug Pod

You can also create pod for debugging which will connect to pod terminal. To find out why the particular pod is not running, you can check Pod Events and Pod Manifest for details.

  • Check the current state of the Pod and recent events with the following command:

kubectl get pods
  • To know more information about each of these pods and to debug a pod depending on the state of the pods, run the following command:

kubectl describe pod <podname>
  • If the pod status shows Pending, it means that it cannot be scheduled onto a node. Generally this is because there are insufficient resources of one type or another that prevent scheduling.

  • If the pod is stuck in the Waiting state, then it has been scheduled to a worker node, but it cannot run on that machine. One of the most common reason of Waiting pods is a failure to pull the container image.

  • If the pod status shows CrashLoopBackOff, it may because some of the containers inside a pod are not operating on the default access token when trying to interact with API.

Here, you can see configuration information about the container(s) and Pod (labels, resource requirements, etc.), as well as status information about the container(s) and Pod (state, readiness, restart count, events, etc.).

Note: A container can have no or multiple shells running in it. If you are not able to create a successful connection, try changing the shell, as the container may not have that shell running.

Last updated