aicoolies logo
K8sGPT logo
K8sGPT logo

K8sGPT

AI-powered Kubernetes diagnostics in plain English

open sourceupdated Aug 16, 2026

K8sGPT is a CNCF Sandbox project that scans Kubernetes clusters, diagnoses issues, and explains problems in plain English with actionable remediation steps. It codifies SRE expertise into built-in analyzers for Pods, Services, Deployments, Ingress, PVCs, CronJobs, and more. K8sGPT connects to AI backends including OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Google Gemini, Amazon Bedrock, Cohere, and local models via Ollama, with data anonymization to protect sensitive cluster information.

Read our K8sGPT review

A detailed review by the aicoolies team — click to read

K8sGPT was introduced in spring 2023 and accepted into the CNCF Sandbox in December of the same year. Written in Go, it works as either a standalone CLI binary or a Kubernetes operator that runs continuously inside the cluster. The CLI approach is straightforward: run k8sgpt analyze --explain and the tool scans the cluster, collects diagnostic data from resource statuses and events, sends anonymized context to the configured AI backend, and returns explanations with specific kubectl commands to resolve each issue. Without the --explain flag, K8sGPT still provides structured diagnostic output using its internal analyzers — essentially codified SRE playbooks — without making any AI calls at all.

The built-in analyzers cover core Kubernetes resources: Pods, Deployments, ReplicaSets, StatefulSets, Services, Ingress, PersistentVolumeClaims, CronJobs, and Nodes. Beyond these defaults, K8sGPT integrates with Trivy for security vulnerability scanning across container images in the cluster, and with AWS Controllers for Kubernetes to analyze AWS resources managed via CRDs. The AI backend options are broad — OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Google Gemini and Vertex AI, Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker, Cohere, Hugging Face, IBM watsonx.ai, and local models through Ollama or LocalAI for air-gapped environments where no data can leave the network.

When deployed as a Kubernetes operator, K8sGPT runs in the background and writes analysis results to custom Result resources, enabling integration with existing monitoring stacks like Prometheus and Alertmanager for automated alerting on detected issues. The operator mode suits production environments that need continuous cluster health monitoring rather than ad-hoc troubleshooting. Installation is available through Homebrew, apt/apk packages, Windows binaries, and Helm charts for the operator. The latest release is v0.4.31, and the sister project Sympozium extends the concept to managing AI agents within Kubernetes clusters.

Pricing

Free and open-source under Apache 2.0, CNCF Sandbox

Platforms

CLI (Go binary), Kubernetes operator, Helm chart, multi-OS

Categories

Tags

Use Cases

Steel logo

Steel

Open-source browser infrastructure for AI agents at scale

Steel is an open-source browser API purpose-built for AI agents, providing managed headless browser sessions with anti-bot bypass, proxy rotation, CAPTCHA solving, and session persistence. It handles the infrastructure layer that browser automation agents like Browser Use and Stagehand run on top of. Self-hostable or available as a cloud service. Over 6,000 GitHub stars.

Open Source
Trigger.dev logo

Trigger.dev

Open-source background jobs and AI workflows for TypeScript

Trigger.dev is an open-source platform for building and deploying background jobs, AI agents, and long-running workflows in TypeScript. It eliminates serverless timeouts with durable task execution, automatic retries, queue-based concurrency control, and elastic scaling. Used by 30,000+ developers at companies like MagicSchool and Icon.com, it processes hundreds of millions of agent runs monthly. Backed by a $16M Series A led by Dalton Caldwell's Standard Capital fund.

freemiumOpen Source
Dokploy logo

Dokploy

Open-source PaaS alternative to Vercel, Heroku, and Netlify

Dokploy is a free open-source platform-as-a-service for self-hosting applications without cloud vendor lock-in. It provides automated deployments from Git repositories, built-in SSL certificates, database provisioning, Docker and Docker Compose support, and a clean web dashboard for managing multiple applications on your own servers. With 18,000+ GitHub stars, it fills the gap for teams wanting Vercel-like deployment simplicity on their own infrastructure.

Open Source
Google Cloud logo

kubectl-ai

Google’s open-source Kubernetes assistant that translates natural-language intent into precise cluster operations.

kubectl-ai is an AI-powered Kubernetes assistant from Google Cloud Platform. It acts as an intelligent interface for cluster work, translating operator intent into Kubernetes commands and workflows. The key distinction from reactive diagnosis tools is that kubectl-ai is designed as an interactive natural-language interface for planning and executing Kubernetes operations, with provider configuration and MCP-oriented workflows around the CLI.

Open SourceTelemetry

Related Tools

computed discovery: shared active categories · kept separate from editor-verified Alternatives

KTransformers parent kvcache-ai logo

KTransformers

Heterogeneous CPU-GPU inference and SFT for large MoE models

Open-source framework for running and fine-tuning large Mixture-of-Experts models with heterogeneous CPU-GPU execution, optimized kernels, limited VRAM and SGLang or LLaMA-Factory integrations.

Open Source
vLLM Production Stack parent vLLM logo

vLLM Production Stack

Official Kubernetes and Helm reference stack built on the vLLM inference engine

Official vLLM reference implementation for scaling the existing inference engine on Kubernetes with Helm, request routing, KV-cache offload, autoscaling and Prometheus/Grafana observability.

Open Source
Dynamo logo

NVIDIA Dynamo

Distributed inference orchestration above vLLM, SGLang and TensorRT-LLM

Open-source, datacenter-scale orchestration layer that coordinates vLLM, SGLang and TensorRT-LLM across nodes with disaggregated serving, KV-aware routing, multi-tier cache management and automatic scaling.

Open Source
GPUStack logo

GPUStack

Open-source GPU control plane for scalable AI model serving

Open-source GPU cluster manager that configures vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM or custom engines, serves models through compatible APIs, and provisions SSH-accessible GPU instances across on-premises, Kubernetes and cloud environments.

Open Source
Mooncake logo

Mooncake

Disaggregated KV cache storage and transfer for LLM serving

Open-source infrastructure for disaggregated LLM serving that pools KV caches across prefill and decode workers, with high-performance transfer, distributed storage and integrations for vLLM and SGLang.

Open Source
LMCache logo

LMCache

Reusable KV cache infrastructure for scalable LLM inference

Open-source KV cache management layer that persists, offloads and reuses model key-value caches across requests and serving engines to reduce repeated prefill work and improve inference throughput.

Open Source

Used in Stacks

Comparisons

FAQ

What is K8sGPT?

K8sGPT is a CNCF Sandbox project that scans Kubernetes clusters, diagnoses issues, and explains problems in plain English with actionable remediation steps. It codifies SRE expertise into built-in analyzers for Pods, Services, Deployments, Ingress, PVCs, CronJobs, and more. K8sGPT connects to AI backends including OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Google Gemini, Amazon Bedrock, Cohere, and local models via Ollama, with data anonymization to protect sensitive cluster information.

Is K8sGPT free?

Yes — K8sGPT is open source and free to use. Free and open-source under Apache 2.0, CNCF Sandbox

Is K8sGPT open source?

Yes — K8sGPT is open source.

What are the best K8sGPT alternatives?

The top editor-verified K8sGPT alternatives are Steel, Trigger.dev, Dokploy, and more.

How does K8sGPT score in our review?

Our hands-on review scores K8sGPT 85/100 overall, based on speed, privacy, and developer-experience testing.