Radar
The missing open-source Kubernetes UI. Single binary. No account required. Free forever.
🌐 radarhq.io · Docs · Releases
Topology, resources, Helm, GitOps, traffic, audit, upgrade impact, and MCP context for AI agents — from your laptop or in-cluster.
- Why Radar?
- Installation
- Usage
- Views — Topology · Resources · Image Filesystem · Timeline · Helm · Compare · TLS · GitOps · Traffic · Cost · Audit · Upgrade impact · RBAC · MCP · Auth
- Supported Resources
- Keyboard Shortcuts
- Security
- Development · Contributing
Why Radar?
- Zero install on your cluster — runs on your laptop, talks to the K8s API directly
- Single binary — no dependencies, no agents, no CRDs
- Fast on big clusters — tested on tens of thousands of pods, with responsive views and live updates under real cluster churn
- Private by design — your cluster data stays on your machine. No account, no agents, no cloud sync. Usage reporting is off unless you opt in, and then sends only anonymous usage counts and coarse cluster facts: Kubernetes version, platform, node-count range, known integrations (what Radar sends)
- Airgapped-friendly — runs as a single binary against the Kubernetes API and works in locked-down environments with outbound egress blocked
- Real-time — watches your cluster via informers, pushes updates to the browser via SSE
- Works everywhere — GKE, EKS, AKS, minikube, kind, k3s, or any conformant cluster
- AI-ready — built-in MCP server lets AI agents inspect, investigate, and operate your cluster through Radar
- In-cluster option — deploy with Helm for shared team access with RBAC-scoped permissions
"Have Radar deployed at work. As far as Kubernetes dashboards go, this is one of the best." — u/TheRealNetroxen
Installation
Quick Install:
curl -fsSL https://get.radarhq.io | sh
Homebrew:
brew install kubectl-radar
Also available from our tap: brew install skyhook-io/tap/radar.
Then run: kubectl radar. Quick install, PowerShell, Homebrew, and Scoop also set up the radar shorthand. Krew and direct downloads use kubectl radar unless you add your own radar symlink.
CLI
Krew (kubectl plugin manager):
kubectl krew install radar
Scoop (Windows):
scoop bucket add skyhook https://github.com/skyhook-io/scoop-bucket
scoop install radar
PowerShell (Windows):
irm https://get.radarhq.io/install.ps1 | iex
Custom install location (macOS/Linux):
curl -fsSL https://get.radarhq.io | INSTALL_DIR="$HOME/.local/bin" sh
Quick install writes to /usr/local/bin unless INSTALL_DIR says otherwise. The directory is created if missing, and needs to be on your PATH for radar and kubectl radar to resolve.
Direct download — GitHub Releases for macOS, Linux, or Windows.
Desktop App
Native desktop app — no terminal needed.
Homebrew (macOS):
brew install --cask skyhook-io/tap/radar-desktop
Debian/Ubuntu — download the .deb from GitHub Releases, then:
sudo apt install ./radar-desktop_*.deb
Fedora/RHEL — download the .rpm from GitHub Releases, then:
sudo rpm -i radar-desktop_*.rpm
Scoop (Windows):
scoop bucket add skyhook https://github.com/skyhook-io/scoop-bucket
scoop install radar-desktop
Windows (direct download) — GitHub Releases.
In-Cluster Deployment
Deploy to your cluster for shared team access:
helm repo add skyhook https://skyhook-io.github.io/helm-charts
helm install radar skyhook/radar -n radar --create-namespace
See the In-Cluster Deployment Guide for Gateway API and ingress exposure, authentication, and RBAC configuration.
Usage
# Opens browser automatically
kubectl radar
# Quick install, PowerShell, Homebrew, and Scoop also set up the bare command
radar
To inspect an in-cluster Radar Cloud installation without changing it:
radar cloud status
radar cloud status --context my-cluster
radar cloud status --context my-cluster --namespace radar --release radar
The command reports installation ownership, chart and image, agent readiness,
and Cloud configuration without printing the connection token. Passing both
--namespace and --release selects an exact installation. Live tunnel status
is reported by Radar Cloud using the token in the referenced Kubernetes Secret.
If the Secret or Hub is unavailable, local installation diagnostics still run.
Interactive terminals use restrained status colors; set NO_COLOR (or pipe the
output) for plain text. URLs, tokens, and suggested commands remain unstyled.
CLI Flags
The table below covers common startup flags. See the full CLI reference; radar --help is authoritative for the installed version.
See Configuration Guide for details on cluster connection precedence, multiple kubeconfig files, and context switching.
Tuning for slow or high-latency clusters
The default deadlines (30 s context switch, 5 m first-paint backstop, 5 s namespace LIST, 20 scope candidates) are tuned for healthy clusters reached over fast, low-latency connections. They are too tight for clusters reached over SSH tunnels, geographically distant control planes, or accounts subject to API-server throttling, where they surface as one of three symptoms:
- "Context switch timed out" toasts when the cache eventually does sync
- "Limited list — RBAC doesn't allow listing all namespaces" even though the account has cluster-wide list permission (the LIST timed out, not RBAC)
- Kinds silently marked denied because the namespace they live in fell past the 20-entry candidate cap
Widen the four flags via CLI or via the matching environment variables
(RADAR_CONTEXT_SWITCH_TIMEOUT, RADAR_FIRST_PAINT_BACKSTOP,
RADAR_NAMESPACE_LIST_TIMEOUT, RADAR_MAX_SCOPE_CANDIDATES) — env vars
keep secrets out of ps and let in-cluster deployments source the values
from a ConfigMap:
# CLI
kubectl radar \
--context-switch-timeout=120s \
--first-paint-backstop=10m \
--namespace-list-timeout=30s \
--max-scope-candidates=200
# Environment (e.g. in a Deployment manifest)
RADAR_CONTEXT_SWITCH_TIMEOUT=120s \
RADAR_FIRST_PAINT_BACKSTOP=10m \
RADAR_NAMESPACE_LIST_TIMEOUT=30s \
RADAR_MAX_SCOPE_CANDIDATES=200 \
kubectl radar
Defaults are preserved when neither the flag nor the env var is set, so existing deployments are unaffected.
Views
Topology
Interactive graph showing how your Kubernetes resources are connected in real-time.
- Two modes: Resources (full hierarchy) and Traffic (network flow path)
- Group by namespace, app label, or view ungrouped
- Filter by resource kind — click any node for full details
- Auto-layout powered by ELK.js, live updates via SSE
Resources
Table-based resource browser with smart columns per resource kind.
- Browse all resource types including CRDs
- Search by name, filter by status or problems (CrashLoopBackOff, ImagePullBackOff, etc.)
- Add custom columns from any label or annotation — sortable, filterable, and resizable
- Click any resource for YAML manifest, related resources, logs, and events
- Set regular or init-container images on Deployments, StatefulSets, DaemonSets, and Argo Rollouts, with live rollout progress in tables, drawers, workload views, and Applications
Image Filesystem Viewer
Inspect container image filesystems directly from the Pod view — no need to pull images locally or exec into containers.
- Click any container image in a Pod to browse its complete filesystem
- Tree view with file sizes, permissions, and symlink targets
- Search files by name across the entire image
- Download individual files for inspection
- Works with public images (Docker Hub, Quay, GHCR) and private registries (GCR, ECR, ACR) using your cluster's ImagePullSecrets
- Disk-based layer caching for fast repeated access
Timeline
Unified timeline of Kubernetes events and resource changes.
- Filter by event type (all or warnings only)
- Resource change diffs showing what changed (replicas, images, etc.)
- Real-time updates as new events occur
Helm
Manage Helm releases deployed in your cluster — inspect values and rendered manifests, diff revisions, identify failed upgrades and rollback-after-failure patterns, diagnose failed hooks, upgrade, rollback, and uninstall. Radar tracks available chart upgrades (from your configured repos or your own OCI registries) and lets you pick a specific target version. See Helm Support for the detailed behavior and limits.
- View all releases across namespaces with status, chart version, app version, resource health, storage namespace, and Flux ownership
- Inspect values, compare revisions across values/manifests/notes/resources, and view release history
- Surface failed upgrades, stuck pending operations, rollback history, and inferred atomic-style rollbacks
- Correlate failed/running hooks with remaining Job, Pod, Event, and redacted log evidence
- Upgrade, rollback, or uninstall releases directly from the UI
Compare Resources
Diff any two Kubernetes resources of the same kind side-by-side — like comparing a staging Deployment to its production sibling, or two pods that should be identical but aren't.
- Two entry points: a
Comparebutton in the resource detail drawer, or compare mode in the resource table (toggle, pick two rows, hit Compare) - Side-by-side or unified view, with one-click swap of A ↔ B
- Diff-only mode collapses unchanged regions so you only see what differs
- Spec-only mode drops
statusfields to focus on intent rather than observed state - Server-assigned noise (
managedFields,resourceVersion,kubectl.kubernetes.io/last-applied-configuration) is stripped automatically so the diff stays signal — flip Raw metadata on if you actually want to see it - Same-namespace candidates are surfaced first in the picker — usually the resource you want to compare against
- Shareable URLs:
/compare?kind=&apiGroup=&a=ns/name&b=ns/name
TLS Certificate Management
View TLS certificate details and expiry dates across all namespaces — catch expiring certificates before they cause outages.
- Parses TLS secrets to show certificate subject, issuer, and validity period
- Dashboard-level certificate expiry overview
- Available from the resource detail view for any TLS-type Secret
GitOps
Monitor, diagnose, and manage FluxCD and ArgoCD resources in one place.
- Fleet view + per-app detail page (Topology / Changes / Activity tabs) for ArgoCD (
Application,ApplicationSet,AppProject) and FluxCD (GitRepository,OCIRepository,HelmRepository,Bucket,Kustomization,HelmRelease,Alert) - Diagnosis pipeline — field-level drift, recent events per resource, stuck-drift-loop detection, parsed operation-failures, structured one-click remediation
- Lifecycle awareness —
Terminatingchip replaces stale Sync/Health badges; severity ramps with deletion age; mutating ops refuse on zombies - Cross-linked from the rest of Radar —
Managed bychip in resource drawers, GitOps routing from Topology + Timeline + Helm view,Consumed bypanel on Flux source CRs - MCP integration —
manage_gitopsexposes sync / suspend / resume / reconcile / rollback with lifecycle-aware refusal
See the GitOps guide for the full feature matrix, RBAC requirements, demo cluster, and single-cluster scope notes.
Traffic
Visualize live network traffic between services using Hubble, Caretta, Istio, or Beyla.
- Auto-detects Hubble (Cilium), Istio, Caretta, or Grafana Beyla as traffic data sources
- Beyla (standalone or via Grafana Alloy) provides eBPF L4 + HTTP visibility with no service mesh, read from Prometheus
- Beyla needs its
networkfeature enabled, and per-port edges additionally needdst.portandtransportnamed inattributes.select— both are off by default, and Radar says so in the Traffic view rather than showing partial edges silently - Animated flow graph showing requests per second between services
- Filter by namespace, protocol, or status code
- Built for large clusters: hidden traffic is filtered at the source, each refresh keeps a bounded number of the newest flows and says how much of the window it covers, and the flow list fetches the records behind a selected node or edge
- Hubble traffic is drawn per workload (Deployment, StatefulSet, …) rather than per pod; the flow list keeps the pods. A map too large to lay out is listed as its connections, failures first, with ways to narrow it
- Focus on a workload (
/, a node's details, or Live traffic on its page once a traffic source is detected) to see only it and what it talks to; the focus is in the URL, so it can be shared - Setup wizard to install a traffic source if none is detected
Workload Metrics
Open a Deployment, StatefulSet or DaemonSet's Metrics tab to investigate request rate, HTTP errors, latency, CPU, memory and throttling. Radar reads an existing Prometheus-compatible backend; resource charts do not require HTTP instrumentation, and request charts use supported Beyla or Istio observations.
- Workload history includes previous replicas when metrics and ownership are retained
- Compare current Pods to find resource outliers
- Automatic discovery and identity checks, with missing or partial data labeled explicitly
See Workload metrics for screenshots, prerequisites, supported configurations and local multi-cluster setup limitations.
Capacity (Karpenter)
Read-only diagnosis for Karpenter-managed fleets — why is my pod pending, which NodePool could take it, why aren't my nodes joining, what is disruption doing to my fleet? Appears automatically when Karpenter NodePools are detected (RBAC-gated).
- Overview — fleet KPIs with claim lifecycle detail, a cluster scheduling-capacity bar (requests vs allocatable, in-flight beyond the edge, pending demand as an honest not-to-scale count), prioritized operational signals, and the NodePool inventory
- NodePool detail — the capacity ledger (configured limit, provisioned, headroom, allocatable, scheduled requests, unallocated, actual usage), claim lifecycle, fleet composition, and workload attribution
- Demand — pending pods grouped by scheduling signature, each group evaluated against every NodePool's declared constraints with per-predicate evidence; filterable by state, pool, and workload
- Activity — provisioning / disruption / interruption episodes classified from Karpenter's exact event vocabulary, with per-evidence confidence
- Every quantity carries per-value certainty (
= ≥ ≤ ?) — unavailable is never rendered as zero, partial is never rendered as exact - Issues, Pending-pod drawers, and the Home posture card deep-link into the right diagnosis
See docs/capacity.md for the full reference.
Cost Insights
Track Kubernetes spending from OpenCost metrics in a PromQL-compatible backend or a Kubecost 3 Aggregator. Auto mode keeps working Prometheus cost metrics, then discovers a local Kubecost Aggregator; a federated agent-only cluster can use its central Aggregator URL in Settings, config, or Helm. Radar reads the configured currency from a running OpenCost or Kubecost workload when available and otherwise uses USD. Source changes are tested and applied separately from the display-currency preference, which can be saved even when a source is unavailable. Radar labels values but does not convert them.
- Allocated workload cost with namespace scope called out separately from cluster-wide node capacity cost
- Cost trend charts with 6h/24h/7d range selector when Prometheus history is available
- Namespace and workload-level cost breakdowns with efficiency scoring
- Node costs with instance type and region pricing
- Appears automatically when compatible Prometheus metrics or Kubecost current allocation data is detected
Cluster Audit
Proactive best-practices scanner with 44 checks across security, reliability, and efficiency — inspired by Polaris, Kubescape, Trivy, and NSA/CISA guidelines. Runs instantly against cached data with zero cluster-side installation.
- Security: privileged containers, privilege escalation, dangerous/insecure capabilities, host namespaces, container runtime socket mounts, sensitive host paths, secrets in ConfigMaps, auto-mounted service account tokens
- Reliability: missing probes, image tag
latest, single-replica deployments, missing PDB/topology spread, pod HA risk (all replicas on same node), orphan services/ingresses, deprecated API versions - Efficiency: missing CPU/memory requests and limits, orphan ConfigMaps/Secrets, PVCs with no consumer observed, long-Pending PVCs, Released PVs that are retained or failing deletion, and Failed PVs
- Check-grouped remediation queue with search and category, severity, and framework filters; expand a check to see affected resources
- Each finding includes description and remediation guidance, with inline hide actions for a check or category
- Configurable: ignored namespaces (with wildcard patterns), disabled checks, persisted across sessions
- Per-resource opt-out via the
radarhq.io/ignore-checksannotation (comma-separated check IDs) — set on the resource a finding is attributed to, so the exclusion travels with the manifest instead of living in one operator's local settings - Framework labels: NSA/CISA, CIS benchmarks
- MCP tool (
get_cluster_audit) for AI-assisted cluster analysis
Network Path Diagnose
Hop-ordered diagnosis for Service, Ingress, HTTPRoute, GRPCRoute, and Gateway - answering "if traffic is sent toward this resource, does it reach a healthy process, and if not which hop breaks first?"
- Composes the detections Radar already runs (missing backend Service, port mismatches, no-ready-endpoints, route not Accepted by parent Gateway, readiness probe targeting the wrong port) into a path shape ordered along the traffic flow
- Upstreams (Ingresses / Routes pointing at a Service) are judged independently - one broken Ingress doesn't condemn the other delivery paths
- First critical hop is named explicitly so the operator can localize the break without reading the whole list; each finding ships a kubectl reproducer
- Optional one-shot reachability test runs DNS / TCP / TLS / HTTP probes against the declared path - direct TCP when Radar is in-cluster, K8s API server proxy when running from a laptop - so the same button works regardless of where Radar runs. Probes never override the static verdict; they add evidence.
- NetworkPolicies that select the subject's pods are statically evaluated for their caller-independent ingress rules: a "would block" WARNING prediction when no rule admits the path's port, a source-restricted advisory, or an outbound egress note. It's a prediction, never a verdict - the CNI is the only enforcement authority, so the live in-cluster probe confirms or downgrades it
- Static trace is pure functions over the in-memory informer cache. Active probing from a laptop uses the cluster's normal RBAC (
get services/proxy,get pods/proxy); in-cluster mode goes directly to the data path. - Exposed via the Reachability tab in the resource detail view (and via the network branch of the MCP
diagnosetool for AI consumers) - see docs/reachability.md
Kubernetes Upgrade Impact
Open Checks → Upgrade impact before upgrading the control plane. Radar compares the current cluster with a target Kubernetes minor and orders evidenced compatibility, health, admission, drain, runtime, and configuration checks by required action. Release-specific checks appear only when their Kubernetes minor lies in the selected upgrade path; the current catalog is reviewed through Kubernetes 1.37.
- Finds blockers such as skipped minor versions, APIs removed in the target release, unsupported kubelet or kube-proxy skew, overlapping PodDisruptionBudgets, the
gitRepovolume driver disabled in Kubernetes 1.36, and removed or locked Kubernetes 1.37 feature gates orscheduling.k8s.io/v1alpha2objects - Flags likely operational impact such as FlexVolume exposure and renamed control-plane metrics as warnings, while intent-dependent configuration such as deprecated Service
externalIPsremains review - Inspects live resources, aggregated API availability, Helm release manifests, kubectl last-applied configuration, API server usage metrics, and PrometheusRule expressions
- Distinguishes Passed, Review, Warning, Blocked, Incomplete, and Not applicable instead of flattening advisory findings, likely impact, and missing evidence into one state
- Scans every namespace the current identity can read; the header namespace picker remains a browsing filter and does not narrow upgrade analysis
- Shows the bundled catalog boundary and the evidence scope for sampled or unavailable data
See the Kubernetes upgrade impact guide for the check catalog, coverage semantics, and RBAC notes.
Access Control (RBAC visibility)
Inspect what any ServiceAccount can actually do — without three kubectl describe calls.
- ServiceAccount detail: direct bindings, effective permissions (per-binding and deduplicated flat view), inherited grants via implicit groups (
system:authenticated,system:serviceaccounts), and "Used by Pods" closing the loop - Pod detail: "Permissions" section showing the most-permissive rules the Pod's SA grants, plus a blast-radius alert when the SA has wildcards, cluster-admin, escalation verbs, or cluster-wide
create pods - Workload detail (Deployment / StatefulSet / DaemonSet): same Permissions section framed at the workload level — every Pod the workload spawns inherits these grants
- Namespace detail: RBAC summary with RoleBindings configured here + ClusterRoleBindings whose subjects reference this namespace
- Role / ClusterRole detail: who is bound to this role, with subject summaries inline
- RoleBinding detail: inline preview of the rules the binding grants + warnings when subjects include wide groups (
system:authenticated,system:unauthenticated,system:masters) - "My Permissions" panel: namespace-scoped live
SelfSubjectRulesReviewfor the current user — for fast "why can't I do X" debugging - MCP:
get_subject_permissionstool exposes the same data to AI agents for "is this SA over-privileged?" / "blast radius if compromised?" queries
Read-only visibility ships first; the considered follow-ups (RBAC audit checks, verb × resource matrix, subject explorer, graph view, in-UI edits, "can-i" queries) are tracked in #1090.
AI Integration (MCP)
Radar includes a built-in Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that lets AI agents — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot (VS Code and CLI), OpenCode, Google Antigravity, and any other MCP client — inspect, investigate, and operate your cluster through Radar.
Instead of raw kubectl output (verbose YAML that burns through LLM context windows), your AI gets pre-processed, token-optimized data: topology graphs, health assessments, deduplicated events, and filtered logs. Diagnosis is read-only by default; optional in-cluster route probing uses short-lived, self-deleting probe pods. Write operations such as restart, scale, apply, and rollback are identified for client confirmation and enforced through Kubernetes RBAC.
Enabled by default. Disable all MCP endpoints with --no-mcp, or expose only
read-only MCP tools with --mcp-read-only and connect to /mcp-readonly.
This setting does not restrict UI or REST API writes. See the
MCP Guide for setup and configuration precedence.
Authentication
For shared in-cluster deployments, Radar supports optional user authentication with per-user Kubernetes RBAC.
- Proxy mode — works with oauth2-proxy, Pomerium, Cloudflare Access, or any auth proxy that sets forwarded headers
- OIDC mode — built-in login via Google, Okta, Dex, Keycloak, or any OIDC provider
- Per-user namespace scoping and write authorization via K8s impersonation
- UI adapts automatically — buttons only appear if the user has RBAC permission
No auth by default (local use). See the Authentication Guide for setup.
Supported Resources
Radar auto-discovers any CRD in your cluster. Popular tools get dedicated integrations with topology edges, detail views, and AI summaries.
Default chart RBAC covers the built-in Kubernetes kinds listed below — Workloads, Networking (including NetworkPolicies and PodDisruptionBudgets), Configuration, Storage (PersistentVolumes, PersistentVolumeClaims, StorageClasses), HorizontalPodAutoscalers, ServiceAccounts, LimitRanges, ResourceQuotas, Nodes, Namespaces, and Events. On Kubernetes 1.37, Radar also surfaces the Workload, PodGroup, CompositePodGroup, PodCertificateRequest, and ClusterTrustBundle APIs when the API server advertises them; the scheduling APIs are feature-gated, while the certificate APIs are stable and enabled by default. These use the generic resource browser rather than dedicated renderers. RBAC objects (Roles, ClusterRoles, RoleBindings, ClusterRoleBindings) are opt-in via rbac.viewRBAC=true. CRD-based integrations (Gateway API, VerticalPodAutoscaler, Calico, ArgoCD, FluxCD, cert-manager, etc.) need both the CRD installed in your cluster and read access granted — most groups are default-on under rbac.crdGroups.<name> (e.g. gatewayApi, verticalPodAutoscaler, calico); check values.yaml or add custom rules via rbac.additionalRules.
Upgrade impact also gets list-only access to CSIStorageCapacities, FlowSchemas, PriorityLevelConfigurations, and PodSecurityPolicies on clusters where those kinds are served. These reads inspect source-manifest evidence and do not add the kinds to Radar's resource browser.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Topology: Pan (drag), Zoom (scroll), Select (click), Multi-select (Shift+click)
Security
Radar reads your cluster through your own credentials and keeps cluster data local. It does not upload manifests, logs, events, metrics, or resource data to Skyhook, and it does not require an account, agent, or cloud backend. Found a vulnerability? Please report it privately to [email protected] — see SECURITY.md for the process and response timelines.
Development
See the Development Guide for building from source and contributing. For automation and integrations, see the HTTP API reference.
Quick start:
git clone https://github.com/skyhook-io/radar.git
cd radar
make deps
# Terminal 1: Frontend with hot reload (port 9273)
make watch-frontend
# Terminal 2: Backend with hot reload (port 9280)
make watch-backend
Contributing
Contributions are welcome! Please read our Contributing Guide for details on the development workflow, pull request process, and coding standards.
Questions or ideas? GitHub Discussions is the place — or come say hi at radarhq.io/community.
About
Radar is built and maintained by Skyhook (YC W23) and is open source under Apache-2.0. The OSS version is fully featured and the recommended way to run Radar.
For teams that want hosted multi-cluster Radar with SSO and shared dashboards, we also offer Radar Cloud.
License
Apache 2.0 — see LICENSE