Skip to content

Support Insight#

In many cases, especially when looking for commercial support there's a need for share the cluster state with other people. While one could always give access to the live cluster that is not always desired nor even possible.

For those kind of cases we can lean on the work our friends at troubleshoot.sh have done.

With troubleshoot tool you can essentially take a dump of the cluster state and share it with other people. You can even use sbctl tool to make the dump tarball to act as Kubernetes API.

Let's look at how this works with k0s.

Setting up#

To gather all the needed data we need another tool called support-bundle.

You can download it from the releases page, pay attention that you download the right architecture.

Creating support bundle#

A Support Bundle needs to know what to collect and optionally, what to analyze. This is defined in a YAML file.

While you can customize the data collection and analysis for your specific needs, we've made a good reference for k0s. These cover the core k0s things like:

  • collecting info on the host
  • collecting system component statuses from kube-system namespace
  • checking health of Kubernetes API, Etcd etc. components
  • collecting k0s logs
  • checking status of firewalls, anti-virus etc. services which are known to interfere with Kubernetes

As we need to collect host level info you should run the commands on the hosts directly, on controllers and/or workers.

To get a support bundle, after setting up the tooling, you simply run:

support-bundle --kubeconfig /var/lib/k0s/pki/admin.conf https://docs.k0sproject.io/stable/support-bundle-<role>.yaml

Above <role> refers to either controlleror worker. For different roles we collect different things. If you are running a controller with --enable-worker or --single, where it becomes also a worker, you can also get a combined dump:

support-bundle --kubeconfig /var/lib/k0s/pki/admin.conf https://docs.k0sproject.io/stable/support-bundle-controller.yaml https://docs.k0sproject.io/stable/support-bundle-worker.yaml

Once the data collection and analysis finishes you will get a file called like support-bundle-<timestamp>.tar.gz. The file contains all the collected info which you can share with other people.