Detect crashes in your Kubernetes cluster using kwatch and Slack

Monitor all changes in your Kubernetes(K8s) cluster & detects crashes in your running apps in real time

Andrew Attallah
3 min readJan 10, 2022

Table of contents

1- What is kwatch?

2- Configure kwatch with Slack

3- Deploy kwatch

What is kwatch?

kwatch is an open-source project that started late in 2021. It aims to help you monitor all changes in your Kubernetes(K8s) cluster, detect crashes in your running apps, and publish notifications to your favorite channels (Slack, Discord, etc.) in real-time.

kwatch logo

In this tutorial, I will help you setup and deploy kwatch on your Kubernetes cluster. Plus, integrate with Slack to get notified on a channel when there is a crash in your apps.

First of all, we need to get the webhook URL of the channel you want the notification to be received on it.

If you know how to generate the webhook URL you can escape this part and go to the configuration section.

Step 1: create a new slack channel (if you don’t have one already)

new channel

Step 2: Go to https://api.slack.com/apps and create an app from scratch and connect it with your workplace.

Step 3: Create an incoming webhook and activate it.

Step 4: Connect it to you channel

Finally we have the webhook URL for the channel.

Configure kwatch

Installation

You can install kwatch into your Kubernetes (k8s) cluster easily in one command.

Step 1: Get Configuration

Get the configuration template

curl  -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/abahmed/kwatch/v0.3.0/deploy/config.yaml -o config.yaml

Step 2: Edit config.yaml with the corresponding configs

example config

Step 2: Apply Configuration

kubectl apply -f config.yaml

Step 3: Deploy kwatch

Deploy kwatch on your cluster with one command

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/abahmed/kwatch/v0.3.0/deploy/deploy.yaml

After deploying you will get notified on the channel that kwatch has started successfully. Now, kwatch is monitoring your apps!

kwatch just started

Here is an example of kwatch messages when a crash is detected.

Kwatch detected a crash

You can find more documentation about kwatch here

If you like kwatch, give it a star on GitHub!

We are happy to hear feedback from you and if you have any request, or suggestion don’t hesitate to ping us on our channels (Discord, GitHub).

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