VMware Octant is a web based tool for developers and Kubernetes administrators to visualize the Kubernetes cluster and its objects. In other words, you can see what’s inside in your Kubernetes Cluster with VMware Octant. It’s true that, Kubernetes is a daunting technology to understand, and deal with without a proper understanding. This web based tool can help developers to run introspective tools, navigate through the cluster, and manage Kubernetes objects with the plugins.

You can find the Project Octant in the GitHub, and follow all the updates and releases. Octant bring you some valuable features such as, resource viewer, summary viewer, port forward, log stream, label filter, cluster navigation, and plugin system.

Run VMware Octant On A Windows Machine

If you need to try this out, you can download the files according to your running Operating System platform in the releases page. I used my Windows computer, and configured to access my Kubernetes cluster remotely, following the steps described in my previous article before I run the Octant tool.

After I downloaded the .zip file, extracted to a folder location. Executable application file was there along with the read me file.

I have navigated to the folder location, and executed the downloaded file. If you simply run the downloaded file, with a double click, it will ask you to run through the command prompt.

It opened up a browser, and started running the Octant with port “7777”, previously it used a random port and now it is fixed to run on this port.

My default services, ConfigMaps, Secrets, Service accounts were listed on the right “Overview” pane, and all the Kubernetes objects were listed on the left pane. We can easily navigate through the objects details listed on the right.

Once you click on an object, information such as metadata, configurations were listed on the right pane. This is how my “Kubernetes service” displayed.

Under nodes, details such as Node name, Labels, Status, Roles, Age, and Version displayed. All the necessary objects were highlighted, and simple click will redirect you to the relevant object location.

Under resource viewer, you can see the resource mappings in a way you can easily understand, along with the resource status.

Complete yaml output of the object could be obtained in the “YAML” tab

Deployment YAML output

Node YAML output

In terms of the values displaying format, it was easy and clear to understand without running any kubectl commands against the master nodes. This is how my ConfigMap looks like with the values.

One important thing, easy log events of the PODs can be in viewed in the “Logs” tab. This is quite important in the troubleshooting, and this makes your life more easier and reduce the burden of log collections.

I hope this is enough for now and you can follow @projectoctant in twitter for more updates.