Troubleshooting Nodes and Cluster Components

Your monitoring dashboard lights up: three nodes just flipped to NotReady. Pods are being evicted. New deployments are stuck Pending. The question isn't whether something is broken. The question is where to start looking.

Node and cluster-level troubleshooting is one of the most practical competencies in the KCNA Container Orchestration domain. Unlike Pod-level debugging (covered in the previous lesson), cluster-level issues involve the infrastructure beneath your workloads: the nodes themselves, the control plane components that manage them, and the resource pressure signals that trigger automatic remediation. Understanding how these pieces interact is what separates "the node is NotReady" from knowing exactly why and what to do about it.