Detect incidents, understand root causes with evidence analysis, and safely preview fixes—all running locally on your machine.
Kubernetes becomes real during incidents—not during tutorials.
When production is down, alerts are firing, and users are impacted, the hardest part isn’t running kubectl. The hardest part is that the truth is scattered:
- pods and objects in kubectl
- events in another place
- logs somewhere else
- rollout history buried in tooling
- “what changed?” living in people’s memory
And during an incident, everyone needs the same answer fast:
“What’s going on in this cluster right now?”
Recently, while exploring tools that make incident response less chaotic, I came across KubeGraf — a local-first Kubernetes incident response control plane designed to reduce cognitive load when time matters most.
KubeGraf’s promise is simple:
Detect incidents, understand root causes with evidence analysis, and safely preview fixes — all running locally on your machine.
Why this matters during real incidents
On-call engineers usually care about a few core questions:
- What changed recently?
- Is the issue isolated or system-wide?
- Is it config/secrets, resources, rollout, or an external dependency?
- What’s the safest next step to restore service?
But answering those questions often turns into tab-switching across:
- kubectl
- logs and events
- metrics dashboards
- deployment history / GitOps trails
- Slack threads and guesswork
KubeGraf tries to unify these signals into an incident-focused view, so you don’t have to manually stitch together a narrative under pressure.
Importantly, KubeGraf isn’t trying to replace kubectl.
It uses your existing ~/.kube/config and respects Kubernetes RBAC — the same access model teams already trust.
What KubeGraf is (the mental model)
KubeGraf is built around one idea:
Incidents are first-class objects.
Instead of showing raw error spam, it aims to structure what’s happening into:
- an incident summary (human-readable)
- a timeline (what happened before/during/after)
- an evidence pack (events, logs, and object state supporting conclusions)
- recommendations that stay grounded in evidence
- safe fix previews (diff-first, apply only if approved)
That “incident-first” framing matters because it matches how engineers actually work when production is failing: stabilize, understand, act safely, and document what happened.
How you interact with it
KubeGraf supports different workflows while keeping the same mental model:
- Terminal UI (TUI): a fast, keyboard-driven interface (the kubegraf CLI) inspired by tools like k9s, but centered around incidents, context, and topology.
- Local Web Dashboard: a browser-based dashboard focused on topology graphs, incident timelines, live event streams, and evidence views.
- The point is consistency: whether you’re in CLI mode or UI mode, you should still be looking at the same “incident picture.”
A realistic incident scenario
Imagine you’re on call. Someone messages:
“Payments API is returning 500s in prod.”
The typical response looks like this:
- switch context
- list pods
- spot CrashLoopBackOff
- open logs
- inspect events
- check rollout history
- compare ConfigMaps/Secrets
- guess what changed
- try a fix and hope it’s safe
KubeGraf’s incident-focused workflow is meant to be more direct:
- Failing pods/workloads are highlighted immediately
- A unified incident timeline correlates deploy/rollout updates, config/secret changes, failure events and restarts, and (where available) resource pressure signals
- An analysis panel can summarize likely root causes based on evidence (not vibes)
- Fix suggestions are shown as a preview first (diff + impact), not auto-applied
The theme is consistent: faster understanding with evidence and safer next steps.
Evidence over “AI magic”
One thing that stood out is the intent to keep diagnosis reproducible.
Instead of opaque answers, the system aims to show:
- what signal triggered the incident
- what evidence supports the conclusion (events/log snippets/object diffs)
- confidence scores
- command transparency (what it ran or would run)
This matters in real operations. During incidents, teams don’t want a black box. They want a tool that can say:
“Here’s what I saw, here’s why I think this is happening, and here’s the exact change I would apply.”
Safe-by-default: preview fixes, don’t auto-remediate
KubeGraf’s posture is intentionally conservative:
- preview first
- you approve or reject
- rollback is explicit
- no blind automation
That safety model fits how real teams operate, where accidental changes can be worse than the incident itself.
Where this could go next
The direction around KubeGraf is especially interesting because it’s not just “make dashboards nicer.” It’s about building an incident intelligence layer on top of Kubernetes workflows.
Post-launch, it could expand into capabilities like
- Incident replay/time-travel debugging for stronger postmortems
- Change attribution (“this started 7 minutes after X changed”) across deployments, config updates, image tags, and scaling events
- Exportable incident and fix history to build a reusable knowledge bank
- A separate Security & Diagnostics module (health checks, posture, attack/vulnerability summaries) without mixing it into incident workflows
- Deeper log-based intelligence for common production failure patterns (5xx spikes, upstream errors, misconfigurations)
This split—Incident Intelligence vs. Security & Diagnostics—is a strong product framing because the user intent is different in each mode.
Learn more
Website: https://kubegraf.io
Documentation: https://kubegraf.io/docs/
Closing thought
Kubernetes has plenty of tools that are great for day-to-day operations.
But incident response is a different mindset: speed, context, and safety matter more than feature count.
KubeGraf’s local-first + evidence + safe preview fixes approach feels aligned with what on-call engineers actually need when things go wrong.
If you’re an SRE/DevOps engineer, I’d love a reality check:
What’s the slowest part of your Kubernetes incident workflow today?
Change attribution? Context switching? noisy alerts? unsafe fixes?
It uses your existing ~/.kube/config and respects Kubernetes RBAC — the same access model teams already trust.
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