Introduction to GKE troubleshooting

Autopilot Standard

Keep your services on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) running smoothly by learning how to effectively troubleshoot your issues. Whether you're new to Kubernetes or an experienced user, learn to diagnose and resolve common problems, ranging from application errors like CrashLoopBackOff to cluster-wide issues like nodes not joining or Pods failing to schedule. You'll learn to troubleshoot these issues by using key tools like the kubectl command-line tool, Cloud Logging, and Cloud Monitoring.

Build your GKE troubleshooting skills with these tools and techniques:

• Review Google Cloud service health and incidents for ongoing reliability incidents that might affect your clusters.

• Quickly identify potential issues by assessing cluster and workload health in the Google Cloud console.

• View the live status of resources like nodes and Pods by investigating the cluster's state with the kubectl command-line tool.

• Find the root cause of failures by conducting historical analysis with Cloud Logging.

• Address issues before they affect users by performing proactive monitoring with Cloud Monitoring.

• Accelerate diagnosis with Gemini Cloud Assist by analyzing errors, receiving step-by-step guidance, and automatically investigating issues.

• Learn how these tools work together by following an example troubleshooting scenario to diagnose and resolve a real-world application failure.

Understand core concepts

If you're new to Kubernetes and GKE, understanding core concepts, like cluster architecture and the relationship between Pods and nodes, is essential before you start to troubleshoot. If you want to learn more, see Start learning about GKE.

It's also helpful to understand which parts of GKE you're responsible for maintaining and which parts Google Cloud is responsible for maintaining. For more information, see GKE shared responsibility.

What's next

• Read Review Google Cloud service health and incidents (the next page in this series).

• For advice about resolving specific problems, review GKE's troubleshooting guides.

• If you can't find a solution to your problem in the documentation, see Get support for further help, including advice on the following topics:

  • Opening a support case by contacting Cloud Customer Care.
  • Getting support from the community by asking questions on StackOverflow and using the google-kubernetes-engine tag to search for similar issues. You can also join the #kubernetes-engine Slack channel for more community support.
  • Opening bugs or feature requests by using the public issue tracker.