# Let us take a dig into Kubevious In this post, we will discuss a tool name "Kubevious" Visualizing Kubernetes is something that everyone wants, the more good the visualization, the more it gets adopted by the community. Tools that help to view/debug the issues/configurations right in front of the screen make the life of dev/ops people easy. There are Different Tools as of today that do the visualization, but I found Kubevious to be different. Along with the visualizations, it also shows the misconfigured labels for the pods-services, instantly shows the RBAC roles/permissions for the service accounts. Sounds Exciting? Let us dive in and see it in action. For this tutorial, we will install Kubevious to a managed k3s cluster (powered by [civo cloud](https://www.civo.com/?ref=3a1d41)) After creating a k3s cluster, save the kubeconfig locally, to check if the cluster is ready and running. ``` kubectl get nodes NAME STATUS ROLES AGE VERSION kube-node-ee97 Ready 61m v1.18.6+k3s1 kube-master-650d Ready master 62m v1.18.6+k3s1 kube-node-b70a Ready 61m v1.18.6+k3s1 ``` Now you can deploy Kubevious to the Kubernetes cluster via helm charts easily (make sure to have helm installed locally ) ``` kubectl create namespace kubevious namespace/kubevious created helm repo add kubevious https://helm.kubevious.io "kubevious" has been added to your repositories helm upgrade --atomic -i -n kubevious --kubeconfig=config --version 0.6.36 --set ingress.enabled=true kubevious kubevious/kubevious Release "kubevious" does not exist. Installing it now. NAME: kubevious LAST DEPLOYED: Tue Aug 25 19:32:38 2020 NAMESPACE: kubevious STATUS: deployed REVISION: 1 TEST SUITE: None ``` Hooray!! Kubevious installed in seconds within the cluster. Let us see how we can access the dashboard ``` kubectl get pods -n kubevious NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE pod/kubevious-ui-68668b4489-bjsqs 1/1 Running 0 4m37s pod/kubevious-parser-84cfb9b8d9-slw6z 1/1 Running 0 4m37s pod/kubevious-6b4786796b-s77hw 1/1 Running 0 4m37s pod/kubevious-mysql-0 1/1 Running 0 4m37s kubectl get ingress -n kubevious NAME CLASS HOSTS ADDRESS PORTS AGE kubevious * 91.211.152.29 80 2m57s kubectl get svc -n kube-system | grep traefik traefik-prometheus ClusterIP 192.168.149.96 9100/TCP 76m traefik LoadBalancer 192.168.179.129 91.211.152.29 80:30078/TCP,443:32162/TCP 76m ``` You can directly access the Kubevious UI by hitting the External IP of Traefik and the port that points to port 80. in this case, it would be 91.211.152.29:30078 Below is the First UI that you get to see : ![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1598364740815/vIz2tm9Q8.png) As you can see, it lists all the namespaces with its configurations (Roles, RoleBindings, ClusterRole, ClusterRoleBindings, Applications deployed in that namespace) ![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1598364975363/zfsECHFAq.png) So if you see any warning signs or any red signs you can see that the alerts section will be populated with a reason for it. ![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1598374739874/fqgDrk1O8.png) You will also be able to view the complete visualization of RBAC - roles and role bindings of in a single view that gives the information on what is the access control level. ![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1598368878815/un9qouxPz.png) ![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1598368908453/ECn7XVS9P.png) You can also see the list of deployed resources, their deployment information, and labels/selector for the service/pod. This is important for rectifying issues on the fly by viewing in the UI. Consider the below scenario: **Say you deploy an nginx app and expose it as a service and while creating the service you didn't specify the labels properly. ** ``` kubectl run nginx --image=nginx --replicas=2 kubectl run --generator=deployment/apps.v1 is DEPRECATED and will be removed in a future version. Use kubectl run --generator=run-pod/v1 or kubectl create instead. deployment.apps/nginx created #Create a Nodeport service and change the app label (in order to create the above scenario ) kubectl expose deployment/nginx --port=80 --type=NodePort service/nginx exposed kubectl get svc NAME TYPE CLUSTER-IP EXTERNAL-IP PORT(S) AGE kubernetes ClusterIP 192.168.128.1 443/TCP 155m nginx NodePort 192.168.220.191 80:32485/TCP 2s kubectl edit svc nginx #change the selector as below image ``` ![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1598369270101/o6YOHnDNe.png) Let us check the Kubevious UI now for the default namespace and you can see that service selector is not able to find any apps. ![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1598369346681/KL6h5Va4s.png) Now, this becomes very helpful if you find any mismatch in the labels/selectors which is a common mistake. Also, there is a very interesting feature called **Time Machine** Say that you have fixed the error now but in the Time Machine, you can view what the error was in past simply by dragging to a specific time window. Below I am showing 2 views -> wrong selector and correct selector ![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1598373041173/4AI-XFUK5.png) ![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1598373068125/_IGIWM2b5.png) So, In my opinion, Kubevious really helps you to dig into your cluster especially the RBAC portions and also helps you debug the label/selector problem easily. For more information and features like **Blast radius, universal search** you can visit the official GitHub Repository: https://github.com/kubevious/kubevious. Saiyam Pathak
[CKA | CKAD | CNCF Ambassador]
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