Hi @nodesocket! Thanks for your support! Your help ironing out the bugs after launch was incredibly helpful.

Thanks! I used Screen Studio for the demos (https://screen.studio). I had to pay for it but I couldn't find the zoom+highlight feature anywhere else.

Regarding Heroku - I loved Heroku the first time I used it so I set up my Kubernetes cluster to work in a similar way (`git push` to deploy to production). I know K8s has a reputation for being useful only for large deployments/large teams but in my experience this isn't true. You can run a single node cluster and use it to host multiple projects all sharing the same load balancer, or you can scale up to thousands of machines with many microservices working together internally. Would it be helpful for you to see a HOWTO for setting up a Heroku-like K8s cluster?

> I used Screen Studio for the demos (https://screen.studio)

Thanks for sharing! The zoom and highlight are so simple but really make your demo pop.

> Would it be helpful for you to see a HOWTO for setting up a Heroku-like K8s cluster?

Sure, I think a lot of people would appreciate that!

Yes, there's no index. It uses grep (powered by ripgrep) under the hood.

Kubetail is more lightweight than Loki/Grafana. It fetches logs using the Kubernetes API which means you can only see the current state of the cluster but you can use it without installing any additional software or provisioning storage. Our new search feature greps container log files on the nodes themselves as compared to Loki/Grafana that builds a full-text index in the background and queries that at search time (I think).

Stern is a CLI tool which more closely compares to the Kubetail CLI tool (as opposed to the Kubetail web interface). Currently, there's a lot of overlap between the two tools but Kubetail gives you more control over source filters and time. For example with the Kubetail CLI tool you can do queries like this:

    kubetail logs deployments/web \
      --since 2025-05-01T00:00:00Z \
      --until 2025-05-02T00:00:00Z \
      --zone us-east-1a \
      --with-ts \
      --with-node \
      --with-pod \
      --tail=100

I'm not too familiar with stern though so please correct me if I'm wrong. In any case, soon we're going to add more features to the Kubetail CLI tool that will be unique (e.g. remote grep, system logs).

Thanks for posting a link to Johan's project. I'm in touch with him to figure out the best way to avoid confusing users.

A good starting point would be to not take over the name of an existing product.

Thanks! Kubetail doesn't cache or store logs itself. By default, it uses the Kubernetes API to fetch logs from your cluster and send them directly to your client (browser or terminal). If the "Kubetail Cluster API" is installed then it uses Kubetail's custom agent to do the same.

Presumably I can install this (the web frontend) into k8s itself. Is there a helm chart or kustomize?

Would be really cool to install it into k8s and just hit a hosted web endpoint with all the logs and grep/exploration capabilities kubetail has.

Yep! You can use Kubetail on your desktop (using the CLI tool) or you can install it directly in your cluster using helm:

    helm repo add kubetail https://kubetail-org.github.io/helm-charts/
    helm install kubetail kubetail/kubetail --namespace kubetail-system --create-namespace

Then you can access it using `kubectl proxy` or `kubectl port-forward`:

    kubectl port-forward -n kubetail-system svc/kubetail-dashboard 8080:8080

You can also configure an ingress using the values.yaml file (https://github.com/kubetail-org/helm-charts/blob/main/charts...)

Thanks! Part of what enables us to make a helpful lightweight solution is that we're leveraging the Kubernetes API to give logs context without requiring extra configuration. It'd be great to generalize Kubetail but a lot of that depends on how cloud platforms evolve over the next few years. Do you use Kubernetes?

Thanks! Your comment made my day! It sounds like your use-case is similar to mine when I started working on the project. Now we have a community of contributors working on Kubetail so if you have time, stop by our Discord and let us know what else we can do to help (https://discord.gg/CmsmWAVkvX).

If you get a chance to try out the Kubetail CLI, I'd love to hear your thoughts! There's a lot of overlap with stern at the moment but we're planning on adding new features soon that will be unique (e.g. remote grep, system logs).

If you get a chance, please check out kubetail (https://github.com/kubetail-org/kubetail). It's an open source log viewer for Kubernetes. Currently you can use it to look at pod logs from beginning to end, grouped together by workload (e.g. Deployment, CronJob) with basic filtering available (e.g. node-id, AZ). It doesn't let you look at historical logs yet but that's where we're headed. We just launched so we're eager for feedback and we like to build out new features quickly.

Interesting. Will be following this tool.

There is a CLI tool with the same name that does something similar - https://github.com/johanhaleby/kubetail