Kubernetes: pod memory usage

26 Sep, 2025 • 152 words • 1 min • updated 03 Jan, 2026

Problem statement: Given a pod in Kubernetes, check its memory (RAM) usage.

     shell
     
kubectl top pod -n {namespace} {pod name} [--containers]

--containers=false:
    If present, print usage of containers within a pod.

This only works if metrics server is installed (it should be!).

There’s an alternative:

     shell
     
kubectl describe PodMetrics {pod name}

It must be PodMetrics. PodMetric does not work (ugh!¹):

     shell
     
   
% kubectl get PodMetric
error: the server doesn't have a resource type "PodMetric"

If metrics server is not available for some reason, then one needs to dive into the container:

     shell
     
kubectl exec -it {pod name} -n {namespace} -- /bin/sh

…which won’t always work; not every container has /bin/sh. Then read the contents of /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/memory.usage_in_bytes.

Who designed this? Is it so hard to achieve consistency? Both kubectl get pod and kubectl get pods work. Why can’t it be the same with PodMetric? And, no, PodMetricses does not work either. ↩︎