Getting support

Get a Google support package

Google Cloud offers different support packages to meet different needs, such as mission-critical 24/7 coverage, phone support, and access to a technical support manager. The support team helps you troubleshoot any GKE-related issues that you might encounter and gives you a single-point of contact also for help with any other Google Cloud product. Additionally, you can get expert-advice, and recommendations on how to best configure your clusters and workloads.

For more information, see Google Cloud Support.

Recommendations for efficient support

You can get the best troubleshooting for business-critical incidents by performing the following recommended steps:

  1. Check that your cluster is current with one of the GKE current versions. See checking available and default versions.

  2. Make sure that Stackdriver Kubernetes Engine Monitoring is enabled when creating the cluster. If you don't want to ingest your workload logs into Stackdriver, there is the option to enable "System-only" logging (available in GKE 1.15.5 and higher, see detailed instructions here: Installing monitoring and logging support.

    Consider that if you choose not to enable logging, the logging data will not be recorded except on the GKE nodes, where the Google Cloud Support team doesn't have access. Log data is often necessary for troubleshooting, which will be then much more difficult and offered on a best-effort basis. In case of a support case, more effort will be required from you, such as for example logging in into GKE nodes and sending an archive file with the logs found on them. Also, not all necessary logs are guaranteed to be present on the nodes, which could block support from identifying the root cause of an issue.

  3. When opening a support case, be as specific as possible about your issue, and make sure that you include at least the following information:

    • Name of the cluster
    • Timestamp / time range of when you noticed the issue, including the timezone
    • As many details as possible about what you see / how you noticed that you have a problem

Get support from the community

Kubernetes being an open-source product, you can get support also from many other places, which we think is a strength of GKE. Among others, you can do one of the following:

Ask a question on Stack Overflow

Ask a question about Kubernetes or GKE on Stack Overflow. For questions about GKE, use the google-kubernetes-engine tag. This tag not only receives responses from the Stack Overflow community, but also from Google engineers, who monitor the tag and offer unofficial support. Review the most-asked questions before posting a new one.

Discuss Google Kubernetes Engine

Join the kubernetes-users Google group to discuss GKE and receive GKE announcements and updates.

You can also take the following actions to engage with the GKE community:

File bugs or feature requests

From the GKE documentation click "Send feedback" near the top right of the page. This will open a feedback form. Your comments will be reviewed by the GKE team.

Alternatively, if you encounter a bug or want to request a feature for Kubernetes, file an issue on GitHub.

Before you file an issue, search existing issues to ensure that your issue has not already been addressed.

For bugs, include detailed information about how to reproduce the problem, such as:

  • Kubernetes version: kubectl version
  • Cloud provider, OS distro, network configuration, and Docker version
  • Steps to reproduce the problem