Monitoring

Kubetail exposes health check endpoints and structured log output on each component. This page describes how to monitor the health of Kubetail itself when it is deployed inside your cluster.

---

Health checks

Each component exposes a health endpoint that your cluster’s liveness and readiness probes use to determine pod health.

Dashboard and Cluster API

Both the Dashboard and the Cluster API expose an HTTP health endpoint:

GET /healthz

The Helm chart configures liveness and readiness probes against this endpoint automatically. You can use the same endpoint to check component status manually:

kubectl exec -n kubetail-system deploy/kubetail-dashboard -- \
  wget -qO- http://localhost:8080/healthz

Cluster Agent

The Cluster Agent exposes a standard gRPC health service on its gRPC port (:50051). The Helm chart uses grpc_health_probe inside the container to check readiness and liveness.

---

Logging

All three components emit structured logs in JSON format by default. Each log entry includes a timestamp, log level, and contextual fields such as a request_id for tracing individual requests through the system.

Log levels

Level	Description
debug	Verbose output, including internal request routing details
info	Normal operational messages (default)
warn	Recoverable issues that may need attention
error	Failures that affect request handling
disabled	No log output

Configuration

Log level and format are configured per component via runtimeConfig in your Helm values:

kubetail:
  dashboard:
    runtimeConfig:
      logging:
        level: info
        format: json        # json or pretty
        access-log:
          enabled: true
          hide-health-checks: true  # suppress /healthz from access logs
  clusterAPI:
    runtimeConfig:
      logging:
        level: info
        format: json
        access-log:
          enabled: true
          hide-health-checks: true
  clusterAgent:
    runtimeConfig:
      logging:
        level: info
        format: json

Tip

Use format: pretty during development for human-readable log output. In production, format: json integrates better with log aggregation tools.

Access logs

The Dashboard and Cluster API include an HTTP access log that records each incoming request. Access log entries include the HTTP method, path, status code, duration, remote address, and request ID. You can suppress health check requests from the access log to reduce noise:

logging:
  access-log:
    enabled: true
    hide-health-checks: true

---

Checking pod readiness

To check the overall health of the Kubetail deployment:

kubectl get pods -n kubetail-system

All pods should show Running status with readiness probes passing. If a pod is not ready, inspect its events and logs:

kubectl describe pod -n kubetail-system <pod-name>
kubectl logs -n kubetail-system <pod-name>