Observed Signal · Apr 19, 2026 · Technical Guide · Source: DEV Community · Impact: 2/5 · Sentiment: Positive
Practical Kubernetes Production Troubleshooting Workflow
A practical how-to describing a repeatable sequence for troubleshooting Kubernetes workloads in production. The author prescribes a baseline flow (kubectl get pods -A → kubectl describe pod → kubectl logs --previous → kubectl top → kubectl get events) and a failure-classification approach that maps observed symptoms to targeted diagnosis and recovery actions. Five common scenarios are documented: ImagePullBackOff, CrashLoopBackOff, Pending pods, ingress 502/503 with healthy pods, and cluster DNS/CoreDNS failures. For each scenario the post lists typical root causes, concrete kubectl commands for diagnosis and recovery, and prevention tactics (CI image pinning, startup probes, capacity planning, smoke tests). The guidance emphasizes reading events and previous logs before restarting to preserve crash context.
Provides operational troubleshooting best practices for Kubernetes reliability—useful for engineering teams operating adtech/martech infrastructure but not industry-shifting.
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Key Takeaways & Evidence Grounding
- Author recommends a fixed troubleshooting sequence: kubectl get pods -A; kubectl describe pod <pod> -n <ns>; kubectl logs <pod> -n <ns> --previous; kubectl top nodes/pods; kubectl get events -n <ns> --sort-by=.metadata.creationTimestamp.
- Common failure classes documented: ImagePullBackOff, CrashLoopBackOff, Pending, 502/503 ingress errors, and DNS/CoreDNS failures.
- CrashLoopBackOff diagnosis stresses using kubectl logs --previous; exit code 137 indicates OOM and suggests increasing memory limits or addressing leaks.
- ImagePullBackOff root causes include wrong image tag, expired/rotated registry credentials, or missing pull secret; recovery uses kubectl set image and kubectl rollout status.
- Cluster DNS issues are diagnosed with nslookup from inside a pod and by checking CoreDNS deployment/pods; restarting or fixing CoreDNS (ConfigMap/upstream resolvers) is a common recovery.
Ontology Mapping & Concepts
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12 DevOps Errors That Page Teams Most
The article catalogs twelve common production DevOps errors that most frequently trigger on-call pages and gives the single first diagnostic check to run for each. Examples include CrashLoopBackOff, ImagePullBackOff/ErrImagePull, OOMKilled (exit code 137), inode exhaustion, DNS timeouts inside pods, Postgres 'too many clients', connection refused, TLS handshake timeouts, read-only filesystems, Multi-Attach volume errors, 502 Bad Gateway, and exec format errors. The author emphasizes that these messages are symptoms, not root causes, and that the key skill is knowing the single command or check that turns a symptom into a cause. The post links to a fuller, searchable library of troubleshooting guides on the author's site for deeper diagnostics and prevention checklists.
Step-by-step Kubernetes OOMKilled Debugging Guide
A technical how-to explaining how to diagnose and fix Kubernetes OOMKilled container terminations. The article outlines steps to confirm OOM events, measure memory usage (with Prometheus examples), find memory leaks with language-specific techniques for Node.js, Python and Go, and common causes/fixes (low limits, unbounded caches, leaked connections). It also provides a Prometheus alert recipe to proactively warn when containers approach memory limits. The piece was written by Dr. Samson Tanimawo and published on July 10, 2026.
etcd NOSPACE recovery guide for on‑prem Kubernetes
A DEV.to post documents a production incident where an on‑prem Kubernetes control plane became unresponsive because etcd hit its storage limit and raised a NOSPACE alarm. The author describes diagnosing the issue by inspecting etcd logs and per‑node disk usage, then recovering the cluster without kubectl by SSHing into master nodes, using crictl to exec into the etcd container, and running etcdctl compact, defrag and alarm disarm on each member. The guide explains the difference between compaction and defragmentation, notes default etcd size limits (2GB) and that auto‑compaction is often not configured by kubeadm, and recommends adding --auto-compaction-retention=1h to static pod manifests to prevent recurrence.
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