Heapster status stuck in Container Creating or Pending status - kubernetes

I am new to Kubernetes and started working with it from past one month.
When creating the setup of cluster, sometimes I see that Heapster will be stuck in Container Creating or Pending status. After this happens the only way have found here is to re-install everything from the scratch which has solved our problem. Later if I run the Heapster it would run without any problem. But I think this is not the optimal solution every time. So please help out in solving the same issue when it occurs again.
Heapster image is pulled from the github for our use. Right now the cluster is running fine, So could not send the screenshot of the heapster failing with it's status by staying in Container creating or Pending status.
Suggest any alternative for the problem to be solved if it occurs again.
Thanks in advance for your time.

A pod stuck in pending state can mean more than one thing. Next time it happens you should do 'kubectl get pods' and then 'kubectl describe pod '. However, since it works sometimes the most likely cause is that the cluster doesn't have enough resources on any of its nodes to schedule the pod. If the cluster is low on remaining resources you should get an indication of this by 'kubectl top nodes' and by 'kubectl describe nodes'. (Or with gke, if you are on google cloud, you often get a low resource warning in the web UI console.)
(Or if in Azure then be wary of https://github.com/Azure/ACS/issues/29 )

Related

Iguazio job is stuck on 'Pending' status

I have a job I am running in Iguazio. It starts and then the status is "Pending" and the icon is blue. It stays like this indefinitely and there is nothing in the logs that describes what is going on. How do I fix this?
A job stuck in this status is usually a Kubernetes issue. The reason there is no logs in the Iguazio dashboard for the job is because the pod never started, which is where the logs come from. You can navigate to the web shell / Jupyter service in Iguazio and use kubectl commands to find out what is going on in Kubernetes. Usually, I see this when there is an issue with the docker image for the pod, it either can’t be found or has bugs.
In a terminal: doing kubectl get pods and find your pod. It usually has ImagePullBackOff, or CrashLoopBackOff or some similar error. Check the docker image which is usually the culprit. You can kill the pod in Kubernetes, which in turn will error the job out. You can also “abort” the job from the menu in the dashboard under that specific job.

AKS not deleting orphaned resources

After some time, I have problems with some of our clusters where auto-delete of orphaned resources stop working. So if I remove a deployment nor the replicaset or the pods are removed, or if I remove a replicaset, a new one is created but the previous pods are still there.
I can't even update some deployments because that will create a new replicaset+pods.
This is an actual problem as we are creating and removing some resources and relying on auto-child removal.
The thing is that, destroying and creating again a cluster makes it working perfectly and we weren't able to trace to something we did that caused the problem.
I tried to upgrade both master and agent nodes to a newer version and restarting kubelet in agent nodes but that doesn't solve anything.
Could anyone knows where could be the problem or which component is in charge of the cascade deletion of orphan resources?
Does this happen to someone else? It happend to us already in 3 different clusters with different Kubernetes version.
I have tested it creating the test deployment in K8s documentation, and then delete it:
kubectl apply -f https://k8s.io/examples/application/deployment.yaml
kubectl delete deployments.apps nginx-deployment
But the pods are still there.
Thanks in advance
The problem was caused by a faulty CRD / Admission Webhook. It could seem strange, but a wrong CRD or a faulty pod acting as webhook will make kube-controller-manager fail for all resources (at least in AKS). After removing the CRD's and the faulty webhook it started to work again. (The reason why the webhook was failing is another different thing)

Kubernetes Deployment/Pod/Container statuses

I am currently working on a monitoring service that will monitor Kubernetes' deployments and their pods. I want to notify users when a deployment is not running the expected amount of replicas and also when pods' containers restart unexpectedly. This may not be the right things to monitor and I would greatly appreciate some feedback on what I should be monitoring.
Anyways, the main question is the differences between all of the Statuses of pods. And when I say Statuses I mean the Status column when running kubectl get pods. The statuses in question are:
- ContainerCreating
- ImagePullBackOff
- Pending
- CrashLoopBackOff
- Error
- Running
What causes pod/containers to go into these states?
For the first four Statuses, are these states recoverable without user interaction?
What is the threshold for a CrashLoopBackOff?
Is Running the only status that has a Ready Condition of True?
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
Also, would it be bad practice to use kubectl in an automated script for monitoring purposes? For example, every minute log the results of kubectl get pods to Elasticsearch?
You can see the pod lifecycle details in k8s documentation.
The recommended way of monitoring kubernetes cluster and applications are with prometheus
I will try to tell what I see hidden behind these terms
ContainerCreating
Showing when we wait to image be downloaded and the
container will be created by a docker or another system.
ImagePullBackOff
Showing when we have problem to download the image from a registry. Wrong credentials to log in to the docker hub for example.
Pending
The container starts (if start take time) or started but redinessProbe failed.
CrashLoopBackOff
This status showing when container restarts occur too much often. For example, we have process that tries to read not exists file and crash. Then the container will be recreated by Kube and repeat.
Error
This is pretty clear. We have some errors to run the container.
Running
All is good container running and livenessProbe is OK.

Kubernetes Node NotReady: ContainerGCFailed / ImageGCFailed context deadline exceeded

Worker node is getting into "NotReady" state with an error in the output of kubectl describe node:
ContainerGCFailed rpc error: code = DeadlineExceeded desc = context deadline exceeded
Environment:
Ubuntu, 16.04 LTS
Kubernetes version: v1.13.3
Docker version: 18.06.1-ce
There is a closed issue on that on Kubernetes GitHub k8 git, which is closed on the merit of being related to Docker issue.
Steps done to troubleshoot the issue:
kubectl describe node - error in question was found(root cause isn't clear).
journalctl -u kubelet - shows this related message:
skipping pod synchronization - [container runtime status check may not have completed yet PLEG is not healthy: pleg has yet to be successful]
it is related to this open k8 issue Ready/NotReady with PLEG issues
Check node health on AWS with cloudwatch - everything seems to be fine.
journalctl -fu docker.service : check docker for errors/issues -
the output doesn't show any erros related to that.
systemctl restart docker - after restarting docker, the node gets into "Ready" state but in 3-5 minutes becomes "NotReady" again.
It all seems to start when I deployed more pods to the node( close to its resource capacity but don't think that it is direct dependency) or was stopping/starting instances( after restart it is ok, but after some time node is NotReady).
Questions:
What is the root cause of the error?
How to monitor that kind of issue and make sure it doesn't happen?
Are there any workarounds to this problem?
What is the root cause of the error?
From what I was able to find it seems like the error happens when there is an issue contacting Docker, either because it is overloaded or because it is unresponsive. This is based on my experience and what has been mentioned in the GitHub issue you provided.
How to monitor that kind of issue and make sure it doesn't happen?
There seem to be no clarified mitigation or monitoring to this. But it seems like the best way would be to make sure your node will not be overloaded with pods. I have seen that it is not always shown on disk or memory pressure of the Node - but this is probably a problem of not enough resources allocated to Docker and it fails to respond in time. Proposed solution is to set limits for your pods to prevent overloading the Node.
In case of managed Kubernetes in GKE (not sure but other vendors probably have similar feature) there is a feature called node auto-repair. Which will not prevent node pressure or Docker related issue but when it detects an unhealthy node it can drain and redeploy the node/s.
If you already have resources and limits it seems like the best way to make sure this does not happen is to increase memory resource requests for pods. This will mean fewer pods per node and the actual used memory on each node should be lower.
Another way of monitoring/recognizing this could be done by SSH into the node check the memory, the processes with PS, monitoring the syslog and command $docker stats --all
I have got the same issue. I have cordoned and evicted the pods.
Rebooted the server. automatically node came into ready state.

On what basis restart count in kubernetes increase

I have a kubernetes cluster running fine. It has 4 workers and 1 master with the dashboard to view the status. After running it for sometime, I looked at the Restart count of a node and it was 8. I immediately ran the describe command to get any events but there was no events for that pod. However when I checked the logs of the containers, I found out that the node itself was powered down and up 4 times but dont know why it didnt had any events.
In another node, while looking at the restart count, I got event as Sandbox changed which means probably the node was powered down for sometime and thus the master lost connection to it and so incremented the restart count by 2.
I wanted to know how can we get the logs/debug related to this restart count to know why it was restarted.
Whenever a pod is recreated, does it takes up a new name.? If so, how can we get the events of the previous pod.
Does sandbox changed event actually means that master actually lost connection.?
Step by step:
I'd check the kubelet and docker daemon logs, these restarts should appear somewhere in the logs and hopefully more info about what causes them.
Yes, the pod's name is unique thus it change everytime a pod is destroyed and recreated. You can try to find the pod with kubectl get po -a. Other solution is to get all events with kubectl get events and then filter to find your pod's events.
I've seen this error before and in my case it meant problem with the docker daemon networking. But I searched a bit in google and I saw many other reasons. Again, try to analyse the docker daemon and kubelet logs, and also dmesg. If you have doubts please add a link to the logs in your question and I'll try to help.