Insights
Building a platform requires running workloads across many control planes, each with its own source of truth. When something breaks, or when you need to understand what's running on your platform, you have to visit every control plane in turn. Insights brings all of your control planes into a single view. Hub gathers the resources, API types, and packages from every control plane you connect, so you can see your whole fleet in one place and query all of it at once.
What you can do
- See what needs attention. The dashboard counts the resources that aren't ready, the unhealthy packages, and the definitions whose schemas differ between control planes, across every control plane at once.
- Find any resource in the fleet. Search and filter every resource you have permission to read, then open one to see its health, events, and relationships.
- Keep track of what's installed where. See which API types and Crossplane packages each control plane runs, and at which versions.
- Save and share views. Keep a search and its filters as a lens, so you and your team can return to the same view.
- Spot trends over time. Query Crossplane metrics from every control plane together, to see when something started failing and where.
- Ask your coding agent. Give an agent the skill to make queries against Insights for you.
How Insights works
When you connect a control plane or a space to Hub, a connector for it reports the control plane's resources to Hub. Hub keeps a record of each one, and serves those records to the Console and the Insights API. Every Insights feature reads the same records, so the dashboard, the resource list, and an API query always agree.
Insights has two major principles:
- It's read-only. Insights shows what your control planes report. To change a resource, change it on the control plane that owns it.
- Results depend on who's asking. You see only the realms you have permission to read, so two people can get different results for the same query.
How Insights data works explains where the data comes from, how fresh it is, and how access shapes results.
The Console and the Insights API
You can use Insights two ways:
- The Console shows the dashboard and the Insights section, with pages for Resources, Definitions, Packages, and Catalog.
- The Insights API serves the same data to
kubectl, scripts, and agents. It's a set of Kubernetes-style APIs, so you query it with the tools you already use. See Use Hub APIs with kubectl.
Requirements and limits
- Insights needs at least one connected control plane.
- Definitions and Packages are beta and on by default.
- Catalog and Metrics are alpha. Your platform team turns them on with feature flags, and Metrics also needs a metrics pipeline. See Feature lifecycle for what each stage means.