Part X: OpenLENS

Ref: https://github.com/MuhammedKalkan/OpenLens

LENS gives you a way to look at numerous things in your cluster. It consists of the OpenLENS repository, with the core libraries developed by Team LENS and the community. There are other (some commercial) tools, like the IDE, which are built on top of OpenLENS. There are binaries of free OpenLENS product and the easiest way on the Mac is to use brew to install:

brew install --cask openlens

You can then run the app and connect to your Kubernetes cluster, by clicking on the “Browse Clusters In The Catalog” button on the home screen. It will show credentials from your ~/.kube directory, and since we installed a cluster and copied over the config to ~/.kube/config, you should see that listed.

You’ll be able to see a summary of the cluster (CPU, memory, pods), along with a list of resources that you can select on the left side of the window:

There are items to view the nodes, pods, secrets, network services, persistent volume claims, Helm charts, cluster roles, custom resource definitions (CRDs), etc. Clicking on an item will allow you to see all the details, and give you the ability to edit the item.

For example, here is part of the screen for the Loki service:

Showing you labels, annotations, IP info, and access info for the service. You can click on the ports link, to access the service.

Here is the Prometheus Helm chart:

It shows the version and a description. If you were to scroll down, you can see information about the Prometheus Helm repo, and how to install, uninstall, and upgrade the chart.

If you were to check on the Helm Releases, and pick an item, like Prometheus shown below, you can see all the settings:

In summary, LENS gives you a bunch of visibility into the cluster, from one point.

FYI, the Github page for OpenLENS mentions that after 6.3.0, some extensions are not included, but that you can go to the extensions menu and enter in “@alebcay/openlens-node-pod-menu” and install those extensions. I did that and the status of the extensions flipped between enable/disable for quite a while. I exited the app, restarted, and then went to extensions and Enabled this extension.

After, I did see that when I viewed a node, and selected a pod, the menu that allows you to edit and delete the pod, now also has buttons that allow you to attach to the log (didn’t seem to work), shell into log, and view the logs for the containers in the pod. Pretty handy features.