Octant

A web-based, highly extensible platform for developers to better understand the complexity of Kubernetes clusters.

Octant is a tool for developers to understand how applications run on a Kubernetes cluster. It aims to be part of the developer's toolkit for gaining insight and approaching complexity found in Kubernetes. Octant offers a combination of introspective tooling, cluster navigation, and object management along with a plugin system to further extend its capabilities.

Features

• Resource Viewer

  Graphically visualizate relationships between objects in a Kubernetes cluster. The status of individual objects are represented by color to show workload performance.

• Summary View

  Consolidated status and configuration information in a single page aggregated from output typically found using multiple kubectl commands.

• Port Forward

  Forward a local port to a running pod with a single button for debugging applications and even port forward multiple pods across namespaces.

• Log Stream

  View log streams of pod and container activity for troubleshooting or monitoring without holding multiple terminals open.

• Label Filter

  Organize workloads with label filtering for inspecting clusters with a high volume of objects in a namespace.

• Cluster Navigation

  Easily change between namespaces or contexts across different clusters. Multiple kubeconfig files are also supported.

• Plugin System

  Highly extensible plugin system for users to provide additional functionality through gRPC. Plugin authors can add components on top of existing views.

Usage

Installation

Package (Linux only)

1. Download the .deb or .rpm from the releases page.

2. Install with either dpkg -i or rpm -i respectively.

Download a Pre-built Binary (Linux, macOS, Windows)

1. Open the releases page from a browser and download the latest tarball.

2. Extract the tarball:

   $ tar -xzvf ~/Downloads/octant_0.4.1_Linux-64bit.tar.gz
   octant_0.4.1_Linux-64bit/README.md
   octant_0.4.1_Linux-64bit/octant

3. Verify it runs:

   $ ./octant_0.4.1_Linux-64bit/octant version

Getting Started

Before starting Octant, make sure you have access to a healthy cluster. If kubectl is installed, test using kubectl cluster-info.

Start running Octant:

$ octant

Octant should immediately launch your default web browser to an available high level port on 127.0.0.1. (i.e. http://127.0.0.1:51234)

For configuring Octant, setting up a development environment, or running tests, refer to the documentation here.

Plugins

Plugins are a core part of Octant in the Kubernetes ecosystem. A plugin can read objects and allows users to add components to Octant's views.

An example plugin can be found in cmd/octant-sample-plugin and installed to the default plugin path with make install-test-plugin.

Documentation for plugin components can be found in docs/plugins.

Discussion

Feature requests, bug reports, and enhancements are welcome. Contributors, maintainers, and users are encouraged to collaborate through these communication channels:

• Twitter
• Google group
• GitHub issues

Contributing

New contributors will need to sign a contributor license agreement before code changes can be merged. Follow the instructions given by vmwclabot after opening a pull request.

Pull requests should also include a changelog with the naming convention described here.

See our roadmap for tentative features in a 1.0 release.

License

Octant is available under the Apache License, Version 2.0