Event timeline

Radar timeline - merged stream of K8s events, resource diffs, and Helm operations with severity filters

The Timeline is a chronologically merged log of:

Kubernetes events (kubectl get events-equivalent, but searchable)
Resource changes - every observed update, with a diff
Pod lifecycle - container starts, restarts, exits, OOM kills
GitOps activity - Argo / Flux reconciliations and outcomes
Helm operations - install / upgrade / rollback / uninstall events
Audit transitions - when a resource starts or stops failing a check

You can scope it cluster-wide or to a specific resource (drawer → Manifest history).

Storage backends

# In-memory (default). Cleared on restart. Up to --history-limit events.
radar --timeline-storage=memory --history-limit=10000

# SQLite. Persists across restarts. Path = ~/.radar/timeline.db unless overridden.
radar --timeline-storage=sqlite --timeline-db=$HOME/.radar/timeline.db

In-cluster Helm:

timeline:
  storage: sqlite
  dbPath: /data/timeline.db
  historyLimit: 50000
persistence:
  enabled: true
  size: 5Gi

	Memory	SQLite
Survives restart	No	Yes
Disk required	No	Yes (PVC for in-cluster)
Best for	Local dev, ephemeral debugging	Shared in-cluster install
`--history-limit`	Hard cap	Used as a soft retention budget

Retention in Radar Cloud

Both backends above are pod-local: the history lives and dies with the Radar process or the volume you gave it. Connect a cluster to Radar Cloud and the timeline is retained centrally instead, so it survives pod restarts, rescheduling, and cluster maintenance without you provisioning a PVC.

Plan	Retention
Free	24 hours
Team	30 days
Enterprise	1 year

This is retained operational evidence - events and observed resource changes - not a full historical replay of cluster state. See pricing for the current plans.

Filtering

Resource scope - cluster, namespace, or single resource.
Kind / verb - changes vs. events, by API kind.
Severity - normal / warning / error.
Search - free text across reason / message / object name.
Time range - last 5 min / 1 h / 24 h / 7 d / custom.

Diff view

For resource changes, the timeline shows a structured diff (added / removed / changed fields). Click </> to flip to a raw YAML diff. Field-level filters let you suppress noise like metadata.managedFields or status.observedGeneration.

Why “what happened last Tuesday” gets easy

Standard kubectl get events only retains ~1h of cluster events and gets cleared whenever an apiserver pod restarts. Radar’s timeline doesn’t suffer from that:

Memory mode retains up to --history-limit events as long as the Radar process runs.
SQLite mode survives restarts, scaling, and cluster maintenance.
Radar Cloud retains it centrally for up to a year, independent of any single pod or volume.
Resource diffs aren’t in kubectl events at all - Radar synthesizes them by watching every resource via informers.

Events vs. changes

	Event	Change
Source	K8s `Event` resource	Informer diff between two ResourceVersions
Lifetime in K8s	~1h, ephemeral	Until the resource is deleted
In Radar	Stored, indexed, searchable	Stored, indexed, with diff

Get started

Views

In-cluster capabilities

Integrations

Self-hosted setup

Cloud

Reference

Event timeline

Storage backends

Retention in Radar Cloud

Filtering

Diff view

Why “what happened last Tuesday” gets easy

Events vs. changes

See also

​Storage backends

​Retention in Radar Cloud

​Filtering

​Diff view

​Why “what happened last Tuesday” gets easy

​Events vs. changes

​See also

Storage backends

Retention in Radar Cloud

Filtering

Diff view

Why “what happened last Tuesday” gets easy

Events vs. changes

See also