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

While Heapster, InfluxDB, and Grafana are better for customized and heavy-duty views and queries, the Kubernetes dashboard's pre-defined 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 commandline...