Add access to multiple clusters

[Lifailon]

There are many options for reading Kubernetes logs, but I haven't found a single solution that allows viewing logs from different clusters simultaneously. Is it possible to implement this in Dashboard?

This would be incredibly useful, as it's common to have two or even three clusters configured in a mirrored configuration with an external load balancer, and need to view logs for the same application across different clusters.

In kubectl it is possible to use the --context flag to specify a cluster, is it possible to refactor the logic to use this (if supported in the Kubernetes API) when selecting multiple clusters using a checkbox?

[amorey]

There's no technical reason this can't be done; the code that merges streams from multiple containers can easily handle streams from different clusters (https://github.com/kubetail-org/kubetail/blob/main/modules/shared/logs/stream.go). However the UI isn't set up for this and I think it's going to be a while before we can get to this on the roadmap.

As a stopgap, one thing I'd like to do is provide an API that would allow users to implement their own feature set easily. In our last release, we modularized the log viewer into a headless component so we could even provide that for folks who want to build browser GUIs. Otherwise, you could build a Go-based CLI tool using kubetail as a library fairly easily. Would that be helfpul to you?

[amorey]

Another thing we could do as a stopgap is add multi-cluster support to the kubetail logs command. For example, here are some syntax options we could use to allow users to specify different contexts+namespaces:

# Option 1 (close to existing syntax)
kubetail logs context1@ns1:deployments/myapp context2@ns2:deployments/myapp

# Option 2 (also close to existing syntax)
kubetail logs ns1:deployments/myapp@context1 ns2:deployments/myapp@context2

# Option 3 
kubetail logs '[context1:ns1]deployments/myapp' '[context2:ns2]deployments/myapp'

[Lifailon]

I'll take this into account, but I'm only interested in the web interface as a user, not the library as a developer. Currently, in my professional DevOps work, I'm missing such an interface for other users (developers and testers).

Will you be able to provide feedback once this feature becomes available in Dashboard?

[amorey]

No prob, I can let you know when it becomes available in the Dashboard. In terms of exposing Kubetail to other users, how are you currently doing that? This use case has come up a few times already so I'm brainstorming some features to make it easier to share access to logs and it would be useful to hear some details about your use case.

[Lifailon]

Currently, we use the standard Kubernetes/Dashboard and LDAP integration for authentication.