KUBERNETES(1)(kubernetes)

💖 KUBERNETES(1)(kubernetes) — the kubectl top page, bestie edition 💖

okay so hi, welcome to the kubernetes manual, section 1, literally the User commands corner of the manual set (that's the "Manuals / User" thing at the bottom, iykyk). Originally written by Eric Paris back in Jan 2015. Let's get into it 🫶

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✨ NAME ✨

kubectl top — Display resource (CPU/memory) usage

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

kubectl top [OPTIONS]

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

Display resource (CPU/memory) usage.

So basically this command gives you a peek at recent resource consumption for nodes and pods. It pulls metrics from the Metrics Server, which aggregates all that data from the kubelet running on each node. And bestie, listen: the Metrics Server must be installed and running in the cluster for this command to work. No Metrics Server, no vibes. Periodt.

The metrics it shows are specifically optimized for Kubernetes autoscaling decisions — think the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) and the Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA). Because of that, the values may not match the ones you'd get from standard OS tools like top, since these metrics are designed to give a stable signal for autoscalers rather than pinpoint accuracy. Not a bug, it's a feature 💅

FAQ for Metrics Server: https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/metrics-server/blob/master/FAQ.md

🎀 When to use this command 🎀

• For on-the-fly spot-checks of resource usage (e.g. identify which pods are consuming the most resources at a glance, or get a quick sense of the load on your nodes)
• Understand current resource consumption patterns
• Validate the behavior of your HPA or VPA configurations by seeing the metrics they use for scaling decisions.

⚠️ Heads up bestie: this is not meant to be a replacement for full-featured monitoring solutions. Its primary design goal is to provide a low-overhead signal for autoscalers, not to be a perfectly accurate monitoring tool. For high-accuracy reporting, historical analysis, dashboarding, or alerting, you should use a dedicated monitoring solution. No cap. 🙈

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👑 OPTIONS INHERITED FROM PARENT COMMANDS 👑

• --as="" — Username to impersonate for the operation. User could be a regular user or a service account in a namespace.
• --as-group=[] — Group to impersonate for the operation, this flag can be repeated to specify multiple groups.
• --as-uid="" — UID to impersonate for the operation.
• --as-user-extra=[] — User extras to impersonate for the operation, this flag can be repeated to specify multiple values for the same key.
• --cache-dir="/home/username/.kube/cache" — Default cache directory
• --certificate-authority="" — Path to a cert file for the certificate authority
• --client-certificate="" — Path to a client certificate file for TLS
• --client-key="" — Path to a client key file for TLS
• --cluster="" — The name of the kubeconfig cluster to use
• --context="" — The name of the kubeconfig context to use
• --disable-compression=false — If true, opt-out of response compression for all requests to the server
• --insecure-skip-tls-verify=false — If true, the server's certificate will not be checked for validity. This will make your HTTPS connections insecure
• --kubeconfig="" — Path to the kubeconfig file to use for CLI requests.
• --kuberc="" — Path to the kuberc file to use for preferences. This can be disabled by exporting KUBECTL_KUBERC=false feature gate or turning off the feature KUBERC=off.
• --match-server-version=false — Require server version to match client version
• -n, --namespace="" — If present, the namespace scope for this CLI request
• --password="" — Password for basic authentication to the API server
• --profile="none" — Name of profile to capture. One of (none|cpu|heap|goroutine|threadcreate|block|mutex|trace)
• --profile-output="profile.pprof" — Name of the file to write the profile to
• --proxy-url="" — Proxy URL to use for requests to the API server
• --request-timeout="0" — The length of time to wait before giving up on a single server request. Non-zero values should contain a corresponding time unit (e.g. 1s, 2m, 3h). A value of zero means don't timeout requests.
• -s, --server="" — The address and port of the Kubernetes API server
• --tls-server-name="" — Server name to use for server certificate validation. If it is not provided, the hostname used to contact the server is used
• --token="" — Bearer token for authentication to the API server
• --user="" — The name of the kubeconfig user to use
• --username="" — Username for basic authentication to the API server
• --version=false — --version, --version=raw prints version information and quits; --version=vX.Y.Z... sets the reported version
• --warnings-as-errors=false — Treat warnings received from the server as errors and exit with a non-zero exit code

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🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

kubectl(1), kubectl-top-node(1), kubectl-top-pod(1),

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💜 HISTORY 💜

January 2015, Originally compiled by Eric Paris (eparis at redhat dot com) based on the kubernetes source material, but hopefully they have been automatically generated since!

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okay that's the whole page, you ate that 🎀✨ mwah. This lil' rewrite lives under the Manuals source, section User, titled KUBERNETES(1)(kubernetes) — and the original dates allll the way back to Jan 2015. bye bestie, go check your pods' CPU 💅🌈