Show HN: Kubetail – Real-time log search for Kubernetes

126 points

a year ago

Hi Everyone!

Kubetail is a general-purpose logging dashboard for Kubernetes, optimized for tailing logs across multi-container workloads in real-time. With Kubetail, you can view logs from all the containers in a workload (e.g. Deployment or DaemonSet) merged into a single chronological timeline, delivered to your browser or terminal.

I launched Kubetail on HN last year and at that time the top request was to add search. Now I'm happy to say we finally have search available in our latest official release (cli/v0.4.3, helm/v0.10.1). You can check it out in action here:

https://www.kubetail.com/demo

Kubetail normally fetches logs using the Kubernetes API, which does not have search built-in. To enable search, click the “Install” button in the GUI or run `kubetail cluster install` in the CLI to deploy a DaemonSet that places a Kubetail agent on every node. Each agent runs a custom Rust binary powered by ripgrep; it scans the node’s log files and streams only matching lines to your browser or terminal. You can think of a Kubetail search as "remote grep" for your Kubernetes logs. Now you don’t need to download an entire log file just to grep it locally.

Since last year we've also added some other neat features that users find helpful. In particular, we built a simple CLI tool that starts the web dashboard on your desktop:

    # Install
    brew install kubetail

    # Run
    kubetail serve

We also added a powerful logs sub-command to the CLI that you can use to follow container logs or even fetch all the records in a given time window to analyze them in more detail locally (quick-start):

    # Follow example
    $ kubetail logs deployments/web \
        --with-ts \
        --with-pod \
        --follow

    # Fetch example
    $ kubetail logs deployments/web \
        --since 2025-04-20T00:00:00Z \
        --until 2025-04-21T00:00:00Z \
        --all > logs.txt

We’ve added a lot more features since last year but these are the ones I wanted to highlight.

I hope you like what we're doing with Kubetail! Your feedback is very valuable so please let us know what you think in the comments here or in our Discord chat.

Andres

35 comments

# Follow example $ kubetail logs deployments/web \ --with-ts \ --with-pod \ --follow # Fetch example $ kubetail logs deployments/web \ --since 2025-04-20T00:00:00Z \ --until 2025-04-21T00:00:00Z \ --all > logs.txt