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Version: 4.8

Navigating the Rancher Web Console

In order to troubleshoot a deployment, sometimes it is necessary to navigate to the Rancher Web Console to gather information about a deployment and troubleshoot. The Rancher web console URL for your cluster can be found in the ServiceNow CMDB and is also referenced within Azure DevOps for the given application environment.

In order to examine the state of an application in Rancher, navigate to a running pod (usually one container in a pod) as follows:

  • In the left pane of the Rancher web console, navigate to the appropriate cluster and select the target namespace for your application

  • Click on Workloads in the left navigation pane to view the deployments running in the namespace

  • Identify the pod running the application (should be apparent by the name) and confirm its current state based on the "State" column

  • Click the name of the Pod to see more details

  • In order to examine the log output from the application, click the Logs link or icon on the pod detail view

  • In the case of performance (or suspected performance) issues, check the Metrics available through Rancher's monitoring integration to examine CPU, memory or network usage for any anomalous behavior

  • If the application is dependent on environment variables and these values need to be confirmed, review the Environment Variables section in the pod or workload configuration

  • To see if the application has been consistently healthy or has been crashing, failing to start or otherwise exhibiting unhealthy behavior, click on the Events tab to see health problems detected by Kubernetes in monitoring the application

  • Additional details about the deployment of the container can be found under the Details or Config tabs

  • Additional, more in-depth exploration from within the container can be done by clicking the Execute Shell button, which will open an interactive shell running within the live container that runs the application

In addition to examining containers in pods, some other deployment issues, particularly related to connectivity to the deployed application, can be examined by looking at Services and Ingresses for the application:

  • To navigate to the Service definitions and states, click on Service Discovery -> Services in the left navigation pane, then click on the appropriate service name, which will be based on the application stack name, to examine its details

  • To navigate to the Ingress definitions and states, click on Service Discovery -> Ingresses in the left navigation pane, then click on the appropriate ingress name, which will be based on the application stack name, to examine its details

The combination of ingresses and services provide connectivity from outside the Kubernetes cluster to the specific application running within. If the application appears to not be reachable, tracing from the outside inward via these screens and details may provide the necessary information for troubleshooting.