What is Lens?
Lens is the way the world runs Kubernetes. It is an Integrated Development Environment. It provides the full situational awareness for everything that runs in Kubernetes. Not only that, but it’s lowering the barrier of entry for people just getting started and radically improving productivity for people with more experience.
Lens is built on open source and backed by a number of Kubernetes and cloud native ecosystem pioneers. With over 450,000 users and 17,000 stars on GitHub, it’s the largest and most advanced Kubernetes platform in the world.
Why Lens?
- Lens is the most powerful IDE for people who need to deal with Kubernetes clusters on a daily basis.
- It removes complexity and increases productivity.
- Everyone uses Lens, from developers to operations, from startups to large corporations.
- Lens is a stand-alone application available for MacOS, Windows, and Linux.
- It ensures your clusters are properly setup and configured.
- It provides increased visibility, real time statistics, log streams and hands-on troubleshooting capabilities.
- Lens offers enhanced visibility, real-time statistics, log streams, and hands-on troubleshooting.
Installation
Say Bye to Kubectl commands and welcome Lens IDE
Download Lens from here.
Features
- Immediate Situational Awareness in Context - Lens provides users the easiest and fastest path to situational awareness in real-time for Kubernetes applications and clusters. With a context-aware terminal, built-in Prometheus stats, and instant, and easy access to logs, Lens is the fastest tool for navigating through all layers in the stack, viewing performance data, and troubleshooting issues.
- Context Aware Terminal - The built-in terminal includes a version of kubectl that is always API-compatible with your cluster and in the right context by automatically downloading and assigning the correct version in the background. As the user switches from one cluster to another, the terminal maintains the correct kubectl version and context.
- Multi-Cluster Management on Any Cloud - Access and work with any number of Kubernetes clusters on any cloud, from a single unified IDE. The clusters may be local (e.g. minikube) or external (e.g., Mirantis Kubernetes Engine (formerly Docker Enterprise/UCP), EKS, AKS, GKE, Rancher, or OpenShift). Clusters may be added simply by importing the kubeconfig with cluster details.
- Multiple Workspaces - Workspaces are used to organize any number of clusters into logical groups. They are useful for DevOps and SREs who need to manage multiple (even hundreds of) clusters. A single workspace contains a list of clusters and their full configuration.
- Built-In Prometheus Stats - See real-time graphs and resource utilization charts integrated into the dashboard, always in the right context. Lens comes with a built-in and multi-tenant Prometheus setup that respects role-based access control (RBAC) for each user. Users will see visualizations for all the namespaces and resources to which they have access.
- Helm Charts Management - Helm is the package manager for Kubernetes: most Kubernetes workloads and services are deployed as Helm charts. Lens IDE comes with built-in Helm charts management, allowing quick access to and management of thousands of publicly available Helm charts. Users can browse Helm charts, deploy them with a single click, modify configuration settings (with built-in help), explore installed Helm charts and their revisions, and lifecycle manage Helm deployments with single click upgrades.
Walkthrough
Kubernetes Cluster monitoring
Control plane monitoring
Node monitoring
This is done using node-exporter internally and helps us to monitor CPU, Memory and Disk usage of the Nodes
Workload monitoring
Here is the workload monitoring showing the resource-wise statistics for
- Pods
- Deployments
- StatefulSets
- Jobs
- ReplicaSets
- Daemon Sets etc
Pods monitoring
This view here shows the list of pods on All namespaces ( can be filtered) with the number of containers and their health and the Node they are deployed to.
Deployments Monitoring
This shows the Deployment wise monitoring view and the usage statistics along with the PODS underneath.
Besides the aforementioned monitoring views. Lens IDE also provides the following monitoring views
- DeamonSets
- StatefulSets
- ReplicateSets
- Jobs
- CronJobs
you can click on the corresponding tab to select the view and explore the resources underneath
Shortcuts
Lens includes a number of keyboard shortcuts, including:
| SHORTCUT | FUNCTIONS |
| shift-command-A or shift-ctrl-A | Add cluster |
| shift-command-E or shift-ctrl-E | Add extension |
| shift-command-I or shift-ctrl-I | Open webtools sidebar |
| shift-command-P or shift-ctrl-P | Open command palette |
| shift-command-S or shift-ctrl-S | Cluster status |
Reference
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