Watching cluster events

Cluster administrators are encouraged to familiarize themselves with the Event resource type and review the list of system events to determine which events are of interest.

Events are associated with a namespace, either the namespace of the resource they are related to or, for cluster events, the default namespace. The default namespace holds relevant events for monitoring or auditing a cluster, such as node events and resource events related to infrastructure components.

The master API and oc command do not provide parameters to scope a listing of events to only those related to nodes. A simple approach would be to use grep:

$ oc get event -n default | grep Node
Example output
1h         20h         3         origin-node-1.example.local   Node      Normal    NodeHasDiskPressure   ...

A more flexible approach is to output the events in a form that other tools can process. For example, the following example uses the jq tool against JSON output to extract only NodeHasDiskPressure events:

$ oc get events -n default -o json \
  | jq '.items[] | select(.involvedObject.kind == "Node" and .reason == "NodeHasDiskPressure")'
Example output
{
  "apiVersion": "v1",
  "count": 3,
  "involvedObject": {
    "kind": "Node",
    "name": "origin-node-1.example.local",
    "uid": "origin-node-1.example.local"
  },
  "kind": "Event",
  "reason": "NodeHasDiskPressure",
  ...
}

Events related to resource creation, modification, or deletion can also be good candidates for detecting misuse of the cluster. The following query, for example, can be used to look for excessive pulling of images:

$ oc get events --all-namespaces -o json \
  | jq '[.items[] | select(.involvedObject.kind == "Pod" and .reason == "Pulling")] | length'
Example output
4
Note

When a namespace is deleted, its events are deleted as well. Events can also expire and are deleted to prevent filling up etcd storage. Events are not stored as a permanent record and frequent polling is necessary to capture statistics over time.