See what's broken, why, and what changed.
Radar turns live cluster state into answers: failures folded to their root cause, workloads grouped into the applications they form, every event kept past Kubernetes' 1-hour TTL. All of it - plus topology, Helm, GitOps, audits, and MCP for AI agents - in one open-source binary that runs on your laptop or in your cluster.
What you open Radar to look at.
These are the views in Radar's nav rail - each ships in the open-source binary. Pick the one that hurts today and read the deep dive.
Issues & root cause
Failures classified by subject, folded into the root-cause row, with causal links and blast radius. Deterministic, with a probable cause and the change that preceded it.
Applications view
Workloads grouped into the apps they form - Helm, Argo, Flux, label and naming evidence - with health rollups, environment folding, and version-skew badges.
Live topology graph
Every resource and connection, laid out by ELK.js and pushed via SSE. Groups by namespace or label.
Event timeline
Every K8s event and resource delta captured the instant it fires - held past the API server's 1-hour TTL.
GitOps
ArgoCD and Flux in one view - sync state, field-level drift, and diagnosis of why an app is OutOfSync or stuck.
Checks
The built-in cluster audit - 31 best-practice checks across security, reliability, and efficiency, run against cached state in under a second.
Also built into the same binary.
No plugins, no bolt-ons. Auto-discovered when present, off when you don't want them.
Resource browser
Browse every workload, stream logs, exec into pods, edit YAML, port-forward. Auto-discovers any CRD via dynamic informers.
Helm release manager
Every release, every revision, every values file. Roll back, diff revisions, view history. No `helm` CLI required.
Traffic visualization
Auto-detects Hubble (Cilium), Caretta, or Istio. Animated flow graphs with RPS, namespace + protocol filters, status-code analysis.
Cost insights (OpenCost)
Per-namespace, per-workload, per-node cost breakdown. Auto-detected when OpenCost metrics show up in Prometheus. Zero extra config.
120+ ecosystem CRDs
Karpenter, KEDA, cert-manager, Trivy, Velero, External Secrets, CloudNativePG, Knative, Gateway API, Istio, Traefik, Kyverno - native. Plus any CRD you have.
The same engine, served to your agents.
Everything the views give you - issues, topology, events, resources - Radar also exposes over MCP. Your coding agent queries the live cluster through the same diagnosis engine, so it answers from real state instead of guessing, and at a fraction of the tokens raw kubectl would burn.
Read the MCP deep diveLocal or in-cluster. Always airgap-ready.
Same binary on your laptop or in your cluster. No telemetry, no licensing check, no account. Your cluster data never leaves. The one outbound call is an anonymous version check when the UI opens (version plus OS/arch); block egress to releases.skyhook.io and api.github.com and Radar runs fully offline.
kubectl radarSingle native binary. Reads your kubeconfig, opens the browser, watches the cluster via SharedInformers and pushes deltas over SSE. No daemon, container, or cluster-side install.
helm installSame binary, deployed in-cluster for shared team access. OIDC or proxy auth (Google, Okta, Dex, Keycloak, oauth2-proxy, Pomerium, Cloudflare Access). Per-user K8s RBAC via impersonation.
No telemetry, no licensing calls. The only outbound request is an anonymous version check, and blocking it takes Radar fully offline for disconnected, regulated, and government clusters. Apache 2.0, audit every line yourself.
One engine, packaged for the way you work.
The same Go engine powers the CLI, local browser UI, native desktop app, and in-cluster deployment.
The frontend is embedded in the compiled Go binary. Radar Desktop uses the operating system webview instead of bundling Chromium and Node, delivering a faster, lighter desktop app for macOS, Linux, and Windows.
Same SharedInformer pattern Kubernetes controllers use, with Go's lightweight concurrency parallelizing independent work. List once, watch deltas forever - no periodic full scans, rate-limit pressure on big clusters, or UI lag while waiting for the next poll.
Cluster deltas land in your browser the instant they fire, via Server-Sent Events. No polling loop, no “click refresh,” no stale state. SSE survives corporate proxies and re-establishes on disconnect.
Radar Cloud adds the things only useful at fleet scale.
Same OSS engine, hosted by us. Multi-cluster fleet view, persistent history, enterprise SSO, routed alerts.
Multi-cluster fleet view
Every connected cluster across EKS, GKE, AKS, and on-prem in one signed-in app. Cross-cluster search, fleet checks, and package drift across every connected cluster.
Long-term retention
Cloud-backed event timeline retention up to one year, plus UI-action audit logs with 7-, 30-, or 365-day retention and shareable scoped links.
Identity and access
SAML and OIDC SSO on every plan; SCIM directory sync on Enterprise. Workspace-scoped roles. Audit log of every privileged action.
Routed alerts
Slack, PagerDuty, MS Teams, webhooks. Per-cluster routing, in-app inbox, suppression windows. Triggered by event correlations, not raw signal.
What's already in your stack.
Radar meets the stack you already run: cluster tooling it auto-detects and renders natively, the platforms it runs on, and the identity providers you sign in through. A selection:
Amazon EKS
GKE
AKS
On-prem / Any K8s
Plus 120+ ecosystem CRDs Radar renders natively - and any other CRD stays fully browsable, with live YAML. Full integration coverage in the docs
Questions we get about Radar.
Is Radar really free, or is the open-source version a limited trial of Cloud?
Does Radar phone home or send cluster data anywhere?
Can Radar run fully airgapped?
What's the difference between running it locally vs in-cluster?
What does Radar Cloud add that OSS doesn't have?
Bring your first cluster online in 60 seconds.
Install the Helm chart, paste a token, see your cluster. No credit card required.
Apache 2.0 · Self-host forever · Cloud for fleet, alerts, SSO