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View the health status of your nodes

This topic explains the tools and methods available for monitoring node health status in Amazon EKS clusters. The information covers node conditions, events, and detection cases that help you identify and diagnose node-level issues. Use the commands and patterns described here to inspect node health resources, interpret status conditions, and analyze node events for operational troubleshooting.

You can get some node health information with Kubernetes commands for all nodes. And if you use the node monitoring agent through Amazon EKS Auto Mode or the Amazon EKS managed add-on, you will get a wider variety of node signals to help troubleshoot. Descriptions of detected health issues by the node monitoring agent are also made available in the observability dashboard. For more information, see Enable node auto repair and investigate node health issues.

Node conditions

Node conditions represent terminal issues requiring remediation actions like instance replacement or reboot.

To get conditions for all nodes:

kubectl get nodes -o 'custom-columns=NAME:.metadata.name,CONDITIONS:.status.conditions[*].type,STATUS:.status.conditions[*].status'

To get detailed conditions for a specific node

kubectl describe node node-name
      

Example condition output of a healthy node:

  - lastHeartbeatTime: "2024-11-21T19:07:40Z"
    lastTransitionTime: "2024-11-08T03:57:40Z"
    message: Monitoring for the Networking system is active
    reason: NetworkingIsReady
    status: "True"
    type: NetworkingReady

Example condition of a unhealthy node with a networking problem:

  - lastHeartbeatTime: "2024-11-21T19:12:29Z"
    lastTransitionTime: "2024-11-08T17:04:17Z"
    message: IPAM-D has failed to connect to API Server which could be an issue with
      IPTable rules or any other network configuration.
    reason: IPAMDNotReady
    status: "False"
    type: NetworkingReady

Node events

Node events indicate temporary issues or sub-optimal configurations.

To get all events reported by the node monitoring agent

When the node monitoring agent is available, you can run the following command.

kubectl get events --field-selector=reportingComponent=eks-node-monitoring-agent

Sample output:

LAST SEEN   TYPE      REASON       OBJECT                                              MESSAGE
4s          Warning   SoftLockup   node/ip-192-168-71-251.us-west-2.compute.internal   CPU stuck for 23s

To get events for all nodes

kubectl get events --field-selector involvedObject.kind=Node

To get events for a specific node

kubectl get events --field-selector involvedObject.kind=Node,involvedObject.name=node-name
      

To watch events in real-time

kubectl get events -w --field-selector involvedObject.kind=Node

Example event output:

LAST SEEN   TYPE     REASON           OBJECT         MESSAGE
2m          Warning  MemoryPressure   Node/node-1    Node experiencing memory pressure
5m          Normal   NodeReady        Node/node-1    Node became ready

Common troubleshooting commands

# Get comprehensive node status
kubectl get node node-name -o yaml

# Watch node status changes
kubectl get nodes -w

# Get node metrics
kubectl top node