Radar

What it is

An open-source Kubernetes UI that runs as a single binary on your laptop or in-cluster, with an MCP server built in and enabled by default. Its argument against giving an agent raw kubectl is concrete: verbose YAML burns context, raw output carries no topology or health, and kubectl can delete things.

What you get

• A ranked, curated stream of what is actually broken right now — failing workloads and pods, Helm failures, dangling references, pod-startup blockers — with severity and CEL filters — issues
• Root-cause analysis of one workload, GitOps reconciler or network entry in a single call, pairing crashloop status with the highest-signal log line and stating how that line was chosen; network kinds get a coverage-honest reachability diagnosis with an optional bounded probe — diagnose
• Cluster and namespace overviews, live metrics ranked like kubectl top joined with Kubernetes context, resource listing and detail with health rollups, and content search that never indexes secret values — get_dashboard, top_resources, list_resources, get_resource, search
• Topology as a graph or LLM-friendly text chains, and a BFS neighbourhood around one suspect root — get_topology, get_neighborhood
• Deduplicated events with warnings first, the change timeline including Helm deployment history, and logs from a pod or aggregated across a workload with secret redaction and diagnostic filtering — get_events, get_changes, get_pod_logs, get_workload_logs
• Static configuration posture with remediation, kept separate from live health — get_cluster_audit
• Packages and Helm: installed packages across Helm, labels, CRDs, Argo and Flux, release listings with operation trails, and full revision, hook and diff diagnostics — list_packages, list_helm_releases, get_helm_release
• Effective RBAC for a ServiceAccount, User or Group, including an authoritative SubjectAccessReview for a specific verb and resource — get_subject_permissions
• Prometheus work: PromQL instant and range queries with automatic step adjustment, metric and label discovery before you write the query, and alerting and recording rules with their definitions — query_prometheus, discover_metrics, get_prometheus_rules
• Write tools, RBAC-enforced and annotated as destructive so clients can prompt: apply and patch resources with dry-run and diff verification, restart, scale and rollback workloads, drive Argo Rollouts, trigger CronJobs, sync GitOps, and cordon or drain nodes — apply_resource, patch_resource, manage_workload, manage_rollout, manage_cronjob, manage_gitops, manage_node

Requirements

The binary and a kubeconfig — curl -fsSL https://get.radarhq.io | sh && kubectl radar, or Homebrew, or the Helm chart for in-cluster deployment. Nothing is installed on the cluster in laptop mode; it talks to the Kubernetes API directly and respects your RBAC. The MCP endpoint is http://localhost:9280/mcp over HTTP transport, matching --port, and is on by default — disable with --no-mcp. claude mcp add radar --transport http http://localhost:9280/mcp wires it up. No account, no agents, no cloud sync. Apache 2.0.

Setup effort

Follow the published steps — curl -fsSL https://get.radarhq.io | sh (or: brew install skyhook-io/tap/radar)

Tools you get

29 tools named in the project's documentation. Seven are write tools (apply_resource, patch_resource, manage_workload, manage_rollout, manage_cronjob, manage_gitops, manage_node), RBAC-enforced and marked destructive so clients can prompt for confirmation. radar --no-mcp turns the MCP server off.

Where it runs

All 7 documented clients run the server on your machine.