Getting started with Octant in five minutes

Octant is an open-sourced project from VMware and is highly extensible platform for developers to better understand the complexity of Kubernetes clusters.

Octant is a tool for developers to understand how applications run on a Kubernetes cluster. It aims to be part of the developer’s toolkit for gaining insight and approaching complexity found in Kubernetes. Octant offers a combination of introspective tooling, cluster navigation, and object management along with a plugin system to further extend its capabilities.

Octant is a local tool, in that it is installed directly onto your workstation. There is nothing to setup in a Kubernetes cluster to enable Octant. You can use Octant on your workstation and connect to any CNCF compliance Kubernetes cluster that you can reach from your workstation, this includes Kubernetes clusters running in Tanzu Kubernetes Grid multicloud, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid running in vSphere with Tanzu, TKG and native clusters running in VMware Cloud Director with Container Service Extension and of course those in public clouds such as EKS, AKS and GKE for example.

Setting up Octant

https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/octant/releases/v0.23.0

On Windows you’ll need to download the file named

Octant-Setup-0.23.0.exe

Then launch the executable as an Administrator. This will start the installation. Alternatively, you can also use Chocolatey. More on that on the official Octant Documentation.

Preparing your Kube Config

Ensure your local .kube/config file has all of the configs for all of the Kubernetes clusters that you will want to show in Octant. On Windows, this file is located in

Users\<user>\.kube\config

You can see how Octant uses this file under its Preferences settings.

Octant will automatically load this config file when you start it.

The file contents will look something like this

apiVersion: v1
clusters:
- cluster:
    certificate-authority-data: [snipped]
    server: https://tkg-mgmt.vmwire.com:6443
  name: tkg-mgmt
- cluster:
    certificate-authority-data: [snipped]
    server: https://172.16.3.58:6443
  name: tkg-ssc
contexts:
- context:
    cluster: tkg-mgmt
    user: tkg-mgmt-admin
  name: tkg-mgmt-admin@tkg-mgmt
- context:
    cluster: tkg-ssc
    user: tkg-ssc-admin
  name: tkg-ssc-admin@tkg-ssc
current-context: tkg-ssc-admin@tkg-ssc
kind: Config
preferences: {}
users:
- name: tkg-mgmt-admin
  user:
    client-certificate-data: [snipped]
    client-key-data: [snipped]
- name: tkg-ssc-admin
  user:
    client-certificate-data: [snipped]
    client-key-data: [snipped]

Launch Octant

Now that’s all setup you can open Octant and start enjoying the show.

As soon as you launch Octant, it will default the view to the first context in the kube config file. For my setup, this is the tkg-mgmt context which is a TKGm management cluster.

Click on the context drop down menu at the top there will enable you to switch between contexts. The screenshot below shows the switch now to the tkg-ssc context, which in my environment is the shared services cluster.

Have a play around and once you start using Octant, you’ll likely stop using kubectl to query your Kubernetes clusters as Octant provides all that information in a neat tool.

As an example, here is a single view of the AKO config that I wrote about a few articles ago. This shows the avi-system namespace in the tkg-ssc cluster. You can see that there is the ako-0 pod that enables Kubernetes Ingress to the tkg-ssc cluster as well as other resources.

We can also look at other namespaces too. Lets take a look at the Kubernetes Dashboard namespace, remember that one? I wrote another article about it here.

Octant provides a nice view here, you can now see that the external ip for kubernetes dashboard is running on 172.16.4.34. Which is a lot simpler to obtain using Octant than running the command below

kubectl get -n kubernetes-dashboard svc kubernetes-dashboard-public

I probably used Kubernetes Dashboard as a bad example as you can see that Octant provides a much better user experience since Octant is able to show ALL Kubernetes clusters in a single interface when compared to Kubernetes Dashboard. This is because Kubernetes Dashboards runs inside a Kubernetes cluster, you would need to setup a dashboard on every single Kubernetes cluster and each dashboard would have its own endpoint. In simple terms, you’d have multiple browser tabs open to each Kubernetes Dashboard.

With Octant you’d have one. This is not the only benefit of Octant, I guess the best thing to do is install it and try it out.

Author: Hugo Phan

@hugophan View all posts by Hugo Phan