Understanding K9s Pod Information

When using K9s to monitor Kubernetes infrastructure, you’ll see several columns of information about your pods. Here’s what each column in the display means:

Column	Description
NAME	Pod name
READY	Number of pods in ready state / number of pods to be in ready state
RESTARTS	Number of times the pod has been restarted so far
STATUS	State of the pod life cycle (e.g., Running, Completed)
CPU	Current CPU usage (in milli-vCPU)
MEM	Current main memory usage (in MiB)
%CPU/R	Current CPU usage as a percentage of what has been requested by the pod
%MEM/R	Current main memory usage as a percentage of what has been requested by the pod
%CPU/L	Current CPU usage as a percentage of the pod’s limit (cannot exceed this limit)
%MEM/L	Current main memory usage as a percentage of the pod’s limit (cannot exceed this limit)
IP	IP address of the pod
NODE	Name of the node the pod is running on
AGE	Age of the pod (s = seconds, m = minutes, h = hours, d = days)

Resource Metrics Calculation

CPU Metrics

• CPU (milli-vCPU)

  • 1000m (millicores) = 1 vCPU/Core
  • Example: 500m means using half a CPU core
  • Formula: actual_cpu_usage_in_cores * 1000

• %CPU/R (CPU Request)

  • Shows how much of your requested CPU you’re actually using
  • Formula: (current_cpu_usage / cpu_request) * 100
  • Example: If you requested 2 cores and are using 1 core, this would show 50%

• %CPU/L (CPU Limit)

  • Shows how close you are to your CPU limit
  • Formula: (current_cpu_usage / cpu_limit) * 100
  • Example: If your limit is 4 cores and you’re using 3 cores, this would show 75%

Memory Metrics

• MEM (MiB)

  • Actual memory usage in MiB (1 MiB = 1024² bytes)
  • Shows the working set memory (active memory in use)
  • Formula: current_memory_usage_in_bytes / (1024 * 1024)

• %MEM/R (Memory Request)

  • Percentage of requested memory being used
  • Formula: (current_memory_usage / memory_request) * 100
  • Example: If you requested 1GiB and are using 512MiB, this would show 50%

• %MEM/L (Memory Limit)

  • Percentage of memory limit being used
  • Formula: (current_memory_usage / memory_limit) * 100
  • Example: If your limit is 2GiB and you’re using 1.5GiB, this would show 75%

Other Metrics

READY State

• Format: ready_containers/total_containers
• Example: 2/3 means 2 containers are ready out of 3 total containers in the pod
• A container is considered ready when its readiness probe succeeds

RESTARTS

• Cumulative count of container restarts
• Increases when:
  • Container exits with error
  • Liveness probe fails
  • Node failures
  • OOM (Out of Memory) kills

STATUS

Common states include:

• Running: Pod is running normally
• Pending: Pod is waiting to be scheduled
• CrashLoopBackOff: Container is repeatedly crashing
• Completed: Pod has finished its execution (for Jobs/CronJobs)
• Error: Pod failed to execute
• ImagePullBackOff: Unable to pull container image

AGE

• Calculated from pod’s metadata.creationTimestamp
• Automatically formatted to most appropriate unit:
  • 2d: 2 days
  • 3h: 3 hours
  • 45m: 45 minutes
  • 30s: 30 seconds