Overview
The Kubetail web dashboard is a browser-based GUI that gives you a birds-eye view of your Kubernetes workloads and lets you follow multiple log streams in real-time.
You can run the dashboard in two ways:
- On your desktop — use the
kubetailCLI to start a local dashboard server that authenticates against your cluster using your kubeconfig file. No cluster-side installation required. (See Run on Desktop > Installation) - In your cluster — deploy the dashboard as a Kubernetes workload using Helm or YAML manifests, then access it via
kubectl port-forward,kubectl proxy, or an ingress resource. (See Run in Cluster > Installation)
Workloads
Section titled “Workloads”When you open the dashboard the first thing you’ll see is a list of all your Kubernetes workloads:
From here you can:
- Click View next to any workload to open its log console in a new tab
- Select multiple workloads using their checkboxes, then click Open in Console to view their logs merged into a single timeline
Once you select the logs you want to view and click through to the console you’ll see a real-time tail of the logs:
The dashboard supports two log delivery pipelines:
| Pipeline | Requires cluster install? | Features |
|---|---|---|
| Kubernetes API (Basic) | No | Real-time log tailing, basic filtering |
| Kubetail API (Advanced) | Yes | All basic features + log file sizes, last event timestamps, search |
By default the dashboard uses the Kubernetes API pipeline. Installing the Kubetail API in your cluster enables the advanced pipeline automatically.
Health status
Section titled “Health status”Click on the status dot in the lower-right corner to see the health of the dashboard’s backend server, your cluster’s Kubernetes API, and the optional Kubetail Cluster API:
