How to tell when/if/why a container in a kubernetes cluster restarts

kubernetes

I have a single node kubernetes cluster in google container engine to play around with.

Twice now, a small personal website I host in it has gone offline for a couple minutes. When I view the logs of the container, I see the normal startup sequence recently completed, so I assume a container died (or was killed?) and restarted.

How can I figure out the how & why of this happening?

Is there a way to get an alert whenever a container starts/stops unexpectedly?

Best Answer

You can view the last restart logs of a container using:

kubectl logs podname -c containername --previous

As described by Sreekanth, kubectl get pods should show you number of restarts, but you can also run

kubectl describe pod podname

And it will show you events sent by the kubelet to the apiserver about the lifecycled events of the pod.

You can also write a final message to /dev/termination-log, and this will show up as described in the docs.

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