Observe Metrics Server Data

Resource usage of the nodes is useful but is not what we’re looking for. In this chapter, we’re focused on auto-scaling Pods. But, before we get there, we should observe how much memory each of our Pods is using. We’ll start with those running in the kube-system Namespace.

Memory consumption of pods running in kube-system #

Execute the following from your command line to see the memory consumption of all the pods running in the Kube-system.

kubectl -n kube-system top pod

The output (on Docker For Desktop) is as follows.

NAME                                       CPU(cores) MEMORY(bytes)
etcd-docker-for-desktop                    16m        74Mi
kube-apiserver-docker-for-desktop          33m        427Mi
kube-controller-manager-docker-for-desktop 44m        63Mi
kube-dns-86f4d74b45-c47nh                  1m         39Mi
kube-proxy-r56kd                           2m         22Mi
kube-scheduler-docker-for-desktop          13m        23Mi

We can see resource usage (CPU and memory) for each of the Pods currently running in kube-system. If we do not find better tools, we could use that information to adjust the requests of those Pods to be more accurate. However, there are better ways to get that info, so we’ll skip ...