Culver City, CA | November 17, 2020 09:03 AM Eastern Standard Time
Replicated, which enables software vendors to ship on-prem, private cloud, and even air gapped versions of their software, today announced Troubleshoot as a stand alone open source project. Troubleshoot is a framework for application-level troubleshooting of Kubernetes apps that can eliminate the back-and-forth between vendors and customers when installing and managing software in customer environments.
Software vendors and their customers spend countless hours iterating on on-prem software deployments and management. Customers identify installation errors and vendors reply with commands that customers can use to address the error. The process repeats itself for hours or days, is inefficient, and taxes the vendor’s relationship with the customer. Companies can now integrate Troubleshoot into their own processes and documentation. Troubleshoot is exposed as two distinct products: Preflight and Support-bundle, packaged as `kubectl` plugins and distributed via [krew](https://krew.dev).
Preflight
Preflight validates the customer's environment before an application is installed, to prevent common errors. For example, Preflight can check for insufficient memory capacity, the existence of a secret with a certain key to provide access to a database, or the lack of required Kubernetes add-ons; so customers don’t start an installation that may not work.
Support-bundle
Support-bundle collects logs and analyzes the customer’s environment and application configuration to detect and diagnose common problems in a running application. Support-bundle provides a reliable and quick way for an end-user to collect all the information necessary to debug an issue. And, if necessary, automatically redacts sensitive information so that it can be sent to the software vendor for further analysis, without violating security policies.
Troubleshoot isn’t just for commercial software vendors. “Our vision is to see commercial and open source projects include preflight checks and support bundles in their projects,” said Mark Pundsack, CPO of Replicated. “We want to ease the burden of managing Kubernetes applications for everyone. That’s why we’re making it open source.”
You can create your own Preflight checks and Troubleshoot your application or open source project. Get started: https://troubleshoot.sh/docs/
In other Replicated open source news: SchemaHero joins CNCF Sandbox
ShemaHero, an open source project from Replicated, was accepted into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a Sandbox project this month. SchemaHero is an open source project to address complex schema migrations in a Kubernetes-native way. Replicated created SchemaHero to make database schemas declarative and has been running it on its production environment and on-prem installations. For more information about SchemaHero visit https://schemahero.io/.