Maintainers: Heptio

Heptio Sonobuoy is a diagnostic tool that makes it easier to understand the state of a Kubernetes cluster by running a set of Kubernetes conformance tests in an accessible and non-destructive manner. It is a customizable, extendable, and cluster-agnostic way to generate clear, informative reports about your cluster--regardless of your deployment details.

Its selective data dumps of Kubernetes resource objects and cluster nodes allow for the following use cases:

• Integrated end-to-end (e2e) conformance-testing 1.7+
• Workload debugging
• Custom data collection via extensible plugins

NOTE: The table below only applies to the e2e conformance tests.

To ensure that your cluster is running the appropriate Kubernetes version for your Sonobuoy release, see the second column of the table below. Otherwise you may encounter the documented issues.

To easily get a Sonobuoy scan started on your cluster, use the browser-based Sonobuoy Scanner tool. Sonobuoy Scanner also provides a more user-friendly way of viewing your scan results.

Note that Sonobuoy Scanner runs conformance tests only. To learn how to run Sonobuoy with your own YAML files, which allows for further configuration and customization, see the Quickstart section below.

Heptio provides prebuilt Sonobuoy container images in its Google Container Registry (gcr.io/heptio-images). For the sake of faster setup on your cluster, this quickstart pulls from this registry to skip the container build process. You can use this same process to deploy Sonobuoy to production.

This guide executes a Sonobuoy run on your cluster, and records the following results:

• Basic info about your cluster's hosts, Kubernetes resources, and versions.
• (Via plugin) systemd logs from each host
• (Via plugin) The results of a single e2e conformance test ("Pods should be submitted and removed"). See the conformance guide for configuration details.

• You should have access to an up-and-running Kubernetes cluster. If you do not have a cluster, follow the AWS Quickstart Kubernetes Tutorial to set one up with a single command.

• You should have kubectl installed. If not, follow the instructions for installing via Homebrew (MacOS) or building the binary (Linux).

Clone or fork the Sonobuoy repo:

git clone https://github.com/heptio/sonobuoy.git 

Determine if your kube-apiserver supports RBAC with the following command:

export RBAC_ENABLED=$(kubectl api-versions | grep "rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1beta1" -c)

The environment variable you set here indicates whether RBAC-related resources should be included in the autogenerated, standalone YAML file. In an cluster running with --authorization-mode=RBAC, these resources are required to allow Sonobuoy to run properly.

Generate the YAML example:

make generate

This should create examples/quickstart.yaml.

To actually deploy a Sonobuoy pod to your cluster, run the following command in the Sonobuoy root directory:

kubectl apply -f examples/quickstart.yaml

You can view actively running pods with the following command:

kubectl get pods -l component=sonobuoy --namespace=heptio-sonobuoy

To verify that Sonobuoy has completed successfully, check the logs:

kubectl logs -f sonobuoy --namespace=heptio-sonobuoy

If you see the log line no-exit was specified, sonobuoy is now blocking, the Sonobuoy pod has completed its data collection.

Notes:

• The Sonobuoy pod in this example continues to run after it finishes data collection, due to the --no-exit flag in its YAML manifest. This allows you to easily grab the results tarball.

• Sonobuoy collects one data report per run---each time you want a new report you need to delete the existing Sonobuoy YAML files and reapply them (see the tear down step).

• In practice, you should make sure that the Sonobuoy pod writes its results to a Persistent Volume. The quickstart example writes its output to an emptyDir volume for simplicity.

Troubleshooting errors from kubectl logs:

• If you are able to debug and resolve the issue on your own, make sure to delete and reapply Sonobuoy's YAML manifests. Otherwise, file an issue.

To view the output, copy the output directory from the main Sonobuoy pod to somewhere local:

kubectl cp heptio-sonobuoy/sonobuoy:/tmp/sonobuoy ./results --namespace=heptio-sonobuoy

This should copy a single .tar.gz snapshot from the Sonobuoy pod into your local ./results directory. You can extract its contents into /.results with:

tar xzf ./results/*.tar.gz

For information on the contents of the snapshot, see the snapshot documentation.

NOTE: At this time, the layout of the contents of the tarball is subject to change.

To clean up Kubernetes objects created by Sonobuoy, run the following command:

kubectl delete -f examples/quickstart.yaml

To learn how to configure your Sonobuoy runs and integrate plugins, see the /docs directory.

If you encounter any problems that the documentation does not address, file an issue.

Thanks for taking the time to join our community and start contributing!

• Please familiarize yourself with the Code of Conduct before contributing.
• See CONTRIBUTING.md for instructions on the developer certificate of origin that we require.
• There is a mailing list and Slack channel if you want to interact with other members of the community

• We welcome pull requests. Feel free to dig through the issues and jump in.

See the list of releases to find out about feature changes.