What is the primary function of the kubectl top command in Kubernetes?

What is the primary function of the kubectl top command in Kubernetes?

• A. To display the resource usage of pods and nodes in the cluster
• B. To display the resource quotas for the namespace
• C. To monitor API server latency
• D. To scale deployments

Answer: (A)

kubectl top is all about showing current resource consumption. It queries the metrics API (typically via metrics-server) to display CPU and memory usage for nodes and for pods, giving you a real-time snapshot of how your workloads are consuming cluster resources. This helps with capacity planning and troubleshooting resource contention. It isn’t used for quotas, latency monitoring, or scaling actions. Quotas are viewed with resources like resource quotas, latency isn’t shown here (you’d use monitoring tools or API server metrics), and scaling deployments is done with commands that change replica counts, not with kubectl top.

kubectl top is all about showing current resource consumption. It queries the metrics API (typically via metrics-server) to display CPU and memory usage for nodes and for pods, giving you a real-time snapshot of how your workloads are consuming cluster resources. This helps with capacity planning and troubleshooting resource contention.

It isn’t used for quotas, latency monitoring, or scaling actions. Quotas are viewed with resources like resource quotas, latency isn’t shown here (you’d use monitoring tools or API server metrics), and scaling deployments is done with commands that change replica counts, not with kubectl top.