API Server Priority Status Test

The Kubernetes API Server is a critical control plane component with high priority to ensure cluster functionality. Its priority status ensures it receives sufficient resources and remains highly available, especially in HA setups. Priority can be managed using PriorityClasses and taints/tolerations to prevent eviction or scheduling issues. Monitoring health, metrics, and logs ensures reliability.

Monitoring the API Server’s priority status is essential because it ensures the cluster remains functional and responsive. As the control plane's central component, the API Server handles all Kubernetes API requests, interactions with etcd, and cluster state updates. If the API Server becomes overloaded or under-resourced, critical operations like scheduling, scaling, and deployments can fail. Monitoring helps identify performance bottlenecks, prevent downtime, optimize resource usage, and ensure high availability, especially in large or production-grade clusters.

The API Server Priority Status Test continuously monitors the API Server in the target node and reports key metrics like requests received, request pending and executed etc. These metrics are invaluable for the administrators to ensure that service is up and prevent any issues in case service has problems.

Target of the test : A Kubernetes Master Node

Agent deploying the test : An internal agent

Outputs of the test : One set of results for the target Kubernetes Master node being monitored

Configurable parameters for the test

Parameter	Description
Test Period	How often should the test be executed.
Host	The IP address of the host for which this test is to be configured.
Port	Specify the port at which the specified Host listens. By default, this is 6443.
Timeout	Specify the duration (in seconds) beyond which the test will timeout in the Timeout text box. The default value is 10 seconds.
Metric URL	Each of the Kubernetes system components expose monitoring metrics through /metrics endpoint of the HTTP server. For components that don't expose endpoint by default, refer official Kubernetes distribution documentation site. Specify the metric URL textbox.

Measurements made by the test

Measurement	Description	Measurement Unit	Interpretation
Requests received	Indicates the total number of HTTP requests made to the API Server by users, components, and applications.	Number	High request volumes can indicate heavy cluster usage, requiring scaling of control plane resources.
Requests pending in queues	The total number of HTTP requests made to the API Server by users, components, and applications but are currently pending in the queue.	Number
Requests executed	The total number of HTTP requests executed by API Server.	Number