Performance analysis with the dashboard
My favorite tool by far, when I just want to know what's going on in the cluster, is the Kubernetes dashboard. There are a couple of reasons for this, as follows:
- It is built-in (always in sync and tested with Kubernetes)
- It's fast
- It provides an intuitive drill-down interface, from the cluster level all the way down to individual container
- It doesn't require any customization or configuration
Although Heapster, InfluxDB, and Grafana are better for customized and heavy-duty views and queries, the Kubernetes dashboard's predefined views can probably answer all your questions 80-90% of the time.
You can also deploy applications and create any Kubernetes resource using the dashboard by uploading the proper YAML or JSON file, but I will not cover this because it is an anti-pattern for manageable infrastructure. It may be useful when playing around with a test cluster, but for actually modifying the state of the cluster, I prefer the command line. Your mileage...
