k8s-workload-inventory

name	k8s-workload-inventory
description	List Kubernetes workloads and namespaces — pods with their node, phase and readiness, plus events. Use when asked what is running, where it is running, what is failing, or for a general inventory of a cluster.
version	1.0.0
license	Apache-2.0
tags	["kubernetes","k8s","pods","inventory","namespaces","events","troubleshooting"]
user-invocable	true
metadata	{"openclaw":{"requires":{"bins":"[Truncated]","env":"[Truncated]"}}}

Kubernetes Workload Inventory

Server

k8s-mcp — vendored third-party, read-only, 7 tools: pods_list, pods_list_in_namespace, pods_get, namespaces_list, events_list, resources_list, resources_get. See k8s-network-policy for the shared preflight.

Always say which scope you covered

pods_list is cluster-wide; pods_list_in_namespace is not. State which you used. Leaving it ambiguous is how "12 pods" gets read as the whole cluster when it was one namespace.

And say which cluster answered — an operator with several must never have to guess.

Report failures, never omit them

A pod that is not Running is the interesting one. Give its phase and reason:

Phase / reason	Means
Pending + Unschedulable	no node satisfies its requests or affinity
Pending + ContainerCreating	image pull or volume mount in progress
ImagePullBackOff / ErrImagePull	wrong image, wrong tag, or missing pull secret
CrashLoopBackOff	starts and dies repeatedly — check events_list
Running but not Ready	readiness probe failing. It is not serving traffic
Evicted	node pressure

Running is not Ready. A pod can be Running and serving nothing. Report both, and never summarise a set of pods as "healthy" on phase alone.

Events give the why

events_list explains what a pod status only names. Events are time-limited (typically one hour) — an empty event list for an old problem means the events aged out, not that nothing happened. That is another empty-result trap: say "no events in the retention window", not "no events".

Empty results

The six-cause table in k8s-network-policy applies. Most relevant here: a non-existent namespace and an empty namespace both return zero pods. Check namespaces_list before concluding.

Boundaries

Want to…	Use
Pod CPU/memory over time	prometheus, grafana — this is the object model, not metrics
Actual traffic	kubeshark-traffic
Whether traffic is permitted	k8s-network-policy
Why a service has no endpoints	k8s-service-path
Build a lab	containerlab, gns3, cml
Change anything	nothing here. Read-only; Secrets are denied

Rules

1. State the scope — cluster-wide or which namespace.
2. State which cluster.
3. Never omit non-running pods. They are the point.
4. Running ≠ Ready.
5. No events in the window ≠ nothing happened.
6. Read-only.