Radar at 4,000 Stars: Come Say Hello at KubeCon

Radar passed 4,000 stars on GitHub this weekend. Ten months ago it was a repo nobody had heard of. Today thousands of engineers use it every day, between Radar OSS on laptops and in clusters, and Radar Cloud for teams.

Next week we're at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Salt Lake City, at booth 365. If you use Radar, or you've been meaning to try it, come say hello. Details are at the bottom.

4,000 stars since January

The repo went public on January 20, 2026. Since then:

• 4,000+ stars and 267 forks
• 73 contributors who have had code merged
• 20 minor releases, from v1.0 in February to v1.19 last week
• 25,000+ installs since March, counted by the anonymous update check, on laptops and in clusters

Stars don't tell you whether a tool is any good. What they did tell us is that people kept finding Radar in steady numbers after each launch spike wore off, mostly through word of mouth, Reddit threads, and posts by people we had never met. That's the part we're proud of.

How we got here

January: a Kubernetes UI we wanted to use

We built Radar because the tools we had kept getting in the way. Lens moved core features behind a login, the official Kubernetes Dashboard was archived, and k9s is great until you need to see how forty resources relate to each other. We wanted one binary that opens against your kubeconfig in seconds, needs no account, and shows topology, events, Helm, and GitOps in one place. We wrote up the reasoning when we launched.

We shipped seven releases in the first ten days, including FluxCD and Argo CD support, multi-arch images, and a Windows installer. Most of the early feedback came from launch threads in r/kubernetes and r/devops.

February: the first review, then 1.0

On February 1, William Lam, a platform engineering architect at Broadcom who has been writing about VMware and Kubernetes for years, published a write-up of Radar. He started out skeptical that it was "just another 'modern' tool", and ended here:

I really like what the Skyhook OSS team has done with Radar ... I am definitely a fan and will be using it as my go to k8s visualization!

He called out the timeline in particular as "a pretty unique feature" for troubleshooting a complex cluster. February 2 is still the biggest single day for stars in Radar's history.

We shipped the built-in MCP server on February 17, so AI agents could read the cluster through the same model the UI uses, and called it 1.0 on February 22.

Spring: teams, and Radar Cloud

Once teams started running Radar in-cluster, the requests changed. People needed sign-in, Kubernetes RBAC, audit logs, and a way to see more than one cluster. We added OIDC and RBAC-based authorization in March, Cluster Audit and NetworkPolicy flow diagrams in April, and launched on Product Hunt on May 3, where Radar finished third of the day. That week Brandon Lee tried it on his homelab clusters for Virtualization Howto and wrote that "it feels like a tool that is not just another dashboard but has something very good to offer in this space." He also singled out the timeline, the same feature William Lam had picked in February.

On May 28 we launched Radar Cloud: fleet views across clusters, Google and GitHub sign-in on every plan, and Kubernetes-native RBAC through impersonation. Radar OSS stayed exactly what it was. We wrote about how we think about the two the week after.

Summer and fall: from "what is running" to "what is broken"

Most of the work since June has gone into answering the questions you open a Kubernetes UI to answer:

• Issues that point at a root cause instead of listing symptoms
• Applications, which group resources the way you think about your software
• AI investigations that run with your own agent CLI over Radar's evidence, and an MCP server benchmark to check the tools are actually useful to agents
• Upgrade impact, Capacity, and Reachability, for the "will this break" and "why can't this schedule" questions
• Cost and rightsizing, Argo Rollouts, and a CloudNativePG workspace

Along the way we went on Cloud Native FM to walk through a broken cluster live. The full list is in the changelog.

Through all of it, Radar OSS is still Apache 2.0, still a single binary, and still needs no account. Try it:

curl -fsSL https://get.radarhq.io | sh
kubectl radar

Come say hello at KubeCon

We'll be at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City, booth 365, for all three expo days, November 10-12. It's in the startup area in Halls 4-5, across the main aisle from the Project Pavilion.

At the booth you can break our demo cluster. Pick a failure from your phone, then watch Radar find it on the booth screen, explain what went wrong, and fix it. We'll also have stickers, hand warmers for the Salt Lake mornings, and several of the people who build Radar.

If you're in town on Monday, November 9, the day before the expo opens, there are two more places to find us:

• The Cloud Native Hackathon, run by WeMakeDevs at The Shop Workspace downtown. Radar sponsors the Kubernetes UI track, "AI SRE", with a $4,000 cash prize, and the judges include Kelsey Hightower. It's free to enter, with room for about 200 people, so register early.
• LearnKube Day, where Nadav Erell, our CEO, is giving a lightning talk.

Come tell us what you use Radar for, what annoys you about it, and what you want next. Many of the features above started as a conversation like that, in a GitHub issue or a Reddit comment. We'd like to have a few more of them in person.

To everyone who starred the repo, filed an issue, sent a PR, or told a colleague about Radar: thank you. See you in Salt Lake City.