iovisor/kubectl-trace

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2186 stars · 176 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

kubectl-trace is a kubectl plugin that schedules the execution of bpftrace programs on nodes and pods in a Kubernetes cluster. It packages eBPF-based tracing into a familiar kubectl workflow, installable via Krew or pre-built binaries.

Use cases

• run bpftrace programs on kubernetes nodes
• trace syscalls in a kubernetes pod
• debug kernel-level performance issues in a cluster
• attach eBPF tracepoints to workloads
• profile a pod's kernel activity from kubectl
• install kubectl tracing plugin via krew

When to choose

• you need eBPF/bpftrace tracing inside Kubernetes without manually building images
• you want to trace a specific pod or node from the kubectl CLI
• you are debugging kernel-level issues in cluster workloads

When to avoid

• your cluster disallows privileged pods or PSP bypass
• you need userspace-only application tracing rather than kernel tracing
• you are not running Kubernetes

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

tracing cli monitoring developer-tools developer-tools monitoring windows cli go kubectl-plugin bpftrace ebpf kubernetes observability tracepoints krew containers devops linux macos

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