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Prometheus-based Kubernetes Resource Recommendations
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Robusta KRR (Kubernetes Resource Recommender) is a CLI tool foroptimizing resource allocation in Kubernetes clusters. It gathers pod usage data from Prometheus andrecommends requests and limits for CPU and memory. Thisreduces costs and improves performance.
New: Put right-sizing on auto-pilot by applying recommendations automatically.Request beta access.
View Instructions for:Prometheus,Thanos,Victoria Metrics,Google Managed Prometheus,Amazon Managed Prometheus,Azure Managed Prometheus,Coralogix,Grafana Cloud andGrafana Mimir
View instructions for:Seeing recommendations in a UI,Sending recommendations to Slack,Setting up KRR as a k9s plugin,Azure Blob Storage Export with Teams Notification
- No Agent Required: Run a CLI tool on your local machine for immediate results. (Or run in-cluster for weeklySlack reports.)
- Prometheus Integration: Get recommendations based on the data you already have
- Explainability:Understand how recommendations were calculated with explanation graphs
- Extensible Strategies: Easily create and use your own strategies for calculating resource recommendations.
- Free SaaS Platform: See why KRR recommends what it does, by using thefree Robusta SaaS platform.
- Future Support: Upcoming versions will support custom resources (e.g. GPUs) and custom metrics.
According to a recentSysdig study, on average, Kubernetes clusters have:
- 69% unused CPU
- 18% unused memory
By right-sizing your containers with KRR, you can save an average of 69% on cloud costs.
Read more abouthow KRR works
| Feature 🛠️ | Robusta KRR 🚀 | Kubernetes VPA 🌐 |
|---|---|---|
| Resource Recommendations 💡 | ✅ CPU/Memory requests and limits | ✅ CPU/Memory requests and limits |
| Installation Location 🌍 | ✅ Not required to be installed inside the cluster, can be used on your own device, connected to a cluster | ❌ Must be installed inside the cluster |
| Workload Configuration 🔧 | ✅ No need to configure a VPA object for each workload | ❌ Requires VPA object configuration for each workload |
| Immediate Results ⚡ | ✅ Gets results immediately (given Prometheus is running) | ❌ Requires time to gather data and provide recommendations |
| Reporting 📊 | ✅ Json, CSV, Markdown,Web UI, and more! | ❌ Not supported |
| Extensibility 🔧 | ✅ Add your own strategies with few lines of Python | |
| Explainability 📖 | ✅See graphs explaining the recommendations | ❌ Not supported |
| Custom Metrics 📏 | 🔄 Support in future versions | ❌ Not supported |
| Custom Resources 🎛️ | 🔄 Support in future versions (e.g., GPU) | ❌ Not supported |
| Autoscaling 🔀 | 🔄 Support in future versions | ✅ Automatic application of recommendations |
| Default History 🕒 | 14 days | 8 days |
| Supports HPA 🔥 | ✅ Enable using--allow-hpa flag | ❌ Not supported |
KRR requires Prometheus 2.26+,kube-state-metrics &cAdvisor.
Which metrics does KRR need?
No setup is required if you use kube-prometheus-stack orRobusta's Embedded Prometheus.If you have a different setup, make sure the following metrics exist:
container_cpu_usage_seconds_totalcontainer_memory_working_set_byteskube_replicaset_ownerkube_pod_ownerkube_pod_status_phase
Note: If one of last three metrics is absent KRR will still work, but it will only consider currently-running pods when calculating recommendations. Historic pods that no longer exist in the cluster will not be taken into consideration.
Brew (Mac/Linux)
- Add our tap:
brew tap robusta-dev/homebrew-krr
- Install KRR:
brew install krr
- Check that installation was successful:
krr --help
- Run KRR (first launch might take a little longer):
krr simple
Windows
You can install using brew (see above) onWSL2, or install from source (see below).
Docker image, binaries, and airgapped installation (offline environments)
You can download pre-built binaries fromReleases or use the prebuilt Docker container. For example, the container for version 1.8.3 is:
us-central1-docker.pkg.dev/genuine-flight-317411/devel/krr:v1.8.3We donot recommend installing KRR from source in airgapped environments due to the headache of installing Python dependencies. Use one of the above methods instead and contact us (via Slack, GitHub issues, or email) if you need assistance.
In-Cluster
Apart from running KRR as a CLI tool you can also run KRR inside your cluster. We suggest installing KRR via theRobusta Platform. It gives you afree UI with some features like the following
- View application usage history graphs on which recommendations are based.
- Get application, namespace and cluster level recommendations.
- YAML configuration to apply the suggested recommendation and more


You can also run KRR in-cluster as a Kubernetes Job, if you don't want to view results easily in aUI.
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robusta-dev/krr/refs/heads/main/docs/krr-in-cluster/krr-in-cluster-job.yamlFrom Source
- Make sure you havePython 3.9 (or greater) installed
- Clone the repo:
git clone https://github.com/robusta-dev/krr
- Navigate to the project root directory (
cd ./krr) - Install requirements:
pip install -r requirements.txt
- Run the tool:
python krr.py --help
Notice that using source code requires you to run as a python script, when installing with brew allows to runkrr.All above examples show running command askrr ..., replace it withpython krr.py ... if you are using a manual installation.
Setup KRR for...
- Google Cloud Managed Prometheus
- Azure Managed Prometheus
- Amazon Managed Prometheus
- Coralogix Managed Prometheus
- Grafana Cloud Managed Prometheus
- Grafana Mimir
Trusting custom Certificate Authority (CA) certificate:
If your llm provider url uses a certificate from a custom CA, in order to trust it, base-64 encode the certificate, and store it in an environment variable namedCERTIFICATE
We highly recommend using thefree Robusta SaaS platform. You can:
Understand individual app recommendations with app usage history
Sort and filter recommendations by namespace, priority, and more
Give devs a YAML snippet to fix the problems KRR finds
Analyze impact using KRR scan history
Basic usage
krr simple
Tweak the recommendation algorithm (strategy)
Most helpful flags:
--cpu-minSets the minimum recommended cpu value in millicores--mem-minSets the minimum recommended memory value in MB--history_durationThe duration of the Prometheus history data to use (in hours)
More specific information on Strategy Settings can be found using
krr simple --help
Giving an Explicit Prometheus URL
If your Prometheus is not auto-connecting, you can usekubectl port-forward for manually forwarding Prometheus.
For example, if you have a Prometheus Pod calledkube-prometheus-st-prometheus-0, then run this command to port-forward it:
kubectl port-forward pod/kube-prometheus-st-prometheus-0 9090
Then, open another terminal and run krr in it, giving an explicit Prometheus url:
krr simple -p http://127.0.0.1:9090
Run on specific namespaces
List as many namespaces as you want with-n (in this case,default andingress-nginx)
krr simple -n default -n ingress-nginx
The -n flag also supports regex matches like -n kube-.*. To use regexes, you must have permissions to list namespaces in the target cluster.
krr simple -n default -n'ingress-.*'Run on workloads filtered by label
Use alabel selector
python krr.py simple --selector'app.kubernetes.io/instance in (robusta, ingress-nginx)'Group jobs by specific labels
Group jobs that have specific labels into GroupedJob objects for consolidated resource recommendations. This is useful for batch jobs, data processing pipelines, or any workload where you want to analyze resource usage across multiple related jobs.
krr simple --job-grouping-labels app,team
This will:
- Group jobs that have either
apporteamlabels (or both) - Create GroupedJob objects with names like
app=frontend,team=backend, etc. - Provide resource recommendations for the entire group instead of individual jobs
- Jobs with the specified labels will be excluded from regular Job listing
You can specify multiple labels separated by commas:
krr simple --job-grouping-labels app,team,environment
Each job will be grouped by each label it has, so a job withapp=api,team=backend will appear in bothapp=api andteam=backend groups.
Use--job-grouping-limit <N> to cap how many jobs are includedper group (useful when there are many historical jobs).
krr simple --job-grouping-labels app,team --job-grouping-limit 3
- Each label group will include at mostN jobs (e.g., the first 3 returned by the API).
- Other matching jobs beyond the limit are ignored for that group.
- If not specified, the default limit is500 jobs per group.
Override the kubectl context
By default krr will run in the current context. If you want to run it in a different context:
krr simple -c my-cluster-1 -c my-cluster-2
Output formats for reporting (JSON, YAML, CSV, and more)
Currently KRR ships with a few formatters to represent the scan data:
table- a pretty CLI table used by default, powered byRich libraryjsonyamlpprint- data representation from python's pprint librarycsv- export data to a csv file in the current directorycsv-raw- csv with raw data for calculationhtml
To run a strategy with a selected formatter, add a-f flag. Usually this should be combined with--fileoutput <filename> to write clean output to file without logs:
krr simple -f json --fileoutput krr-report.json
If you prefer, you can also use--logtostderr to get clean formatted output in one file and error logs in another:
krr simple --logtostderr -f json> result.json2> logs-and-errors.log
Centralized Prometheus (multi-cluster)
See below on filtering output from a centralized prometheus, so it matches only one cluster
Prometheus Authentication
KRR supports all known authentication schemes for Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, Coralogix, and other Prometheus compatible metric stores.
Refer tokrr simple --help, and look at the flags--prometheus-url,--prometheus-auth-header,--prometheus-headers--prometheus-ssl-enabled,--coralogix-token, and the various--eks-* flags.
If you need help, contact us on Slack, email, or by opening a GitHub issue.
Debug mode
If you want to see additional debug logs:krr simple -v
Robusta KRR uses the following Prometheus queries to gather usage data:
CPU Usage:
sum(irate(container_cpu_usage_seconds_total{{namespace="{object.namespace}", pod="{pod}", container="{object.container}"}}[{step}]))Memory Usage:
sum(container_memory_working_set_bytes{job="kubelet", metrics_path="/metrics/cadvisor", image!="", namespace="{object.namespace}", pod="{pod}", container="{object.container}"})
Need to customize the metrics? Tell us and we'll add support.
Get a free breakdown of KRR recommendations in theRobusta SaaS.
By default, we use asimple strategy to calculate resource recommendations. It is calculated as follows (The exact numbers can be customized in CLI arguments):
For CPU, we set a request at the 95th percentile with no limit. Meaning, in 95% of the cases, your CPU request will be sufficient. For the remaining 5%, we set no limit. This means your pod can burst and use any CPU available on the node - e.g. CPU that other pods requested but aren’t using right now.
For memory, we take the maximum value over the past week and add a 15% buffer.
Find about how KRR tries to find the default Prometheus to connecthere.
Prometheus, Victoria Metrics and Thanos auto-discovery
By default, KRR will try to auto-discover the running Prometheus Victoria Metrics and Thanos.For discovering Prometheus it scans services for those labels:
"app=kube-prometheus-stack-prometheus""app=prometheus,component=server""app=prometheus-server""app=prometheus-operator-prometheus""app=rancher-monitoring-prometheus""app=prometheus-prometheus"
For Thanos its these labels:
"app.kubernetes.io/component=query,app.kubernetes.io/name=thanos","app.kubernetes.io/name=thanos-query","app=thanos-query","app=thanos-querier",
And for Victoria Metrics its the following labels:
"app.kubernetes.io/name=vmsingle","app.kubernetes.io/name=victoria-metrics-single","app.kubernetes.io/name=vmselect","app=vmselect",
If none of those labels result in finding Prometheus, Victoria Metrics or Thanos, you will get an error and will have to pass the working url explicitly (using the-p flag).
Scanning with a Centralized Prometheus
If your Prometheus monitors multiple clusters we require the label you defined for your cluster in Prometheus.
For example, if your cluster has the Prometheus labelcluster: "my-cluster-name", then run this command:
krr.py simple --prometheus-label cluster -l my-cluster-name
You may also need the-p flag to explicitly give Prometheus' URL.
Azure Managed Prometheus
For Azure managed Prometheus you need to generate an access token, which can be done by running the following command:
# If you are not logged in to Azure, uncomment out the following line# az loginAZURE_BEARER=$(az account get-access-token --resource=https://prometheus.monitor.azure.com --query accessToken --output tsv);echo$AZURE_BEARER
Than run the following command with PROMETHEUS_URL substituted for your Azure Managed Prometheus URL:
python krr.py simple --namespace default -p PROMETHEUS_URL --prometheus-auth-header"Bearer$AZURE_BEARER"See here about configuring labels for centralized prometheus
Amazon Managed Prometheus
For Amazon Managed Prometheus you need to add your Prometheus link and the flag --eks-managed-prom and krr will automatically use your aws credentials
python krr.py simple -p"https://aps-workspaces.REGION.amazonaws.com/workspaces/..." --eks-managed-promAdditional optional parameters are:
--eks-profile-name PROFILE_NAME_HERE# to specify the profile to use from your config--eks-access-key ACCESS_KEY# to specify your access key--eks-secret-key SECRET_KEY# to specify your secret key--eks-service-name SERVICE_NAME# to use a specific service name in the signature--eks-managed-prom-region REGION_NAME# to specify the region the Prometheus is in
See here about configuring labels for centralized prometheus
Coralogix Managed Prometheus
For Coralogix managed Prometheus you need to specify your Prometheus link and add the flag coralogix_token with your Logs Query Key
python krr.py simple -p"https://prom-api.coralogix..." --coralogix_tokenSee here about configuring labels for centralized prometheus
Grafana Cloud Managed Prometheus
For Grafana Cloud managed Prometheus you need to specify Prometheus link, Prometheus user, and an access token of your Grafana Cloud stack. The Prometheus link and user for the stack can be found on the Grafana Cloud Portal. An access token with ametrics:read scope can also be created using Access Policies on the same portal.
Next, run the following command, after setting the values of PROM_URL, PROM_USER, and PROM_TOKEN variables with your Grafana Cloud stack's Prometheus link, Prometheus user, and access token.
python krr.py simple -p$PROM_URL --prometheus-auth-header"Bearer${PROM_USER}:${PROM_TOKEN}" --prometheus-ssl-enabled
See here about configuring labels for centralized prometheus
Grafana Mimir auto-discovery
By default, KRR will try to auto-discover the running Grafana Mimir.
For discovering Prometheus it scans services for those labels:
"app.kubernetes.io/name=mimir,app.kubernetes.io/component=query-frontend"Free UI for KRR recommendations
We highly recommend using thefree Robusta SaaS platform. You can:
Slack Notification
Put cost savings on autopilot. Get notified in Slack about recommendations above X%. Send a weekly global report, or one report per team.
- A Slack workspace
- Install Robusta with Helm to your cluster and configure slack
- Create your KRR slack playbook by adding the following to
generated_values.yaml:
customPlaybooks:# Runs a weekly krr scan on the namespace devs-namespace and sends it to the configured slack channelcustomPlaybooks:- triggers: - on_schedule: fixed_delay_repeat: repeat: -1 # number of times to run or -1 to run forever seconds_delay: 604800 # 1 week actions: - krr_scan: args: "--namespace devs-namespace" ## KRR args here sinks: - "main_slack_sink" # slack sink you want to send the report to here- Do a Helm upgrade to apply the new values:
helm upgrade robusta robusta/robusta --values=generated_values.yaml --set clusterName=<YOUR_CLUSTER_NAME>
k9s Plugin
Install our k9s Plugin to get recommendations directly in deployments/daemonsets/statefulsets views.
Plugin:resource recommender
Installation instructions:k9s docs
Azure Blob Storage Export with Microsoft Teams Notifications
Export KRR reports directly to Azure Blob Storage and get notified in Microsoft Teams when reports are generated.
- An Azure Storage Account with a container for storing reports
- A Microsoft Teams channel with an incoming webhook configured
- Azure SAS URL with write permissions to your storage container
Create Azure Storage Container: Set up a container in your Azure Storage Account (e.g.,
fileuploads)Generate SAS URL: Create a SAS URL for your container with write permissions:
# Example SAS URL format (replace with your actual values)https://yourstorageaccount.blob.core.windows.net/fileuploads?sv=2024-11-04&ss=bf&srt=o&sp=wactfx&se=2026-07-21T21:12:48Z&st=2025-07-21T12:57:48Z&spr=https&sig=...
Configure Teams Webhook: Set up an incoming webhook in your Microsoft Teams channel (located in the Workflows tab)
Run KRR with Azure Integration:
krr simple -f html \ --azurebloboutput"https://yourstorageaccount.blob.core.windows.net/fileuploads?sv=..." \ --teams-webhook"https://your-teams-webhook-url" \ --azure-subscription-id"your-subscription-id" \ --azure-resource-group"your-resource-group"
- Automatic File Upload: Reports are automatically uploaded to Azure Blob Storage with timestamped filenames
- Teams Notifications: Rich adaptive cards are sent to Teams when reports are generated
- Direct Links: Teams notifications include direct links to view files in Azure Portal
- Multiple Formats: Supports all KRR output formats (JSON, CSV, HTML, YAML, etc.)
- Secure: Uses SAS URLs for secure, time-limited access to your storage
| Flag | Description |
|---|---|
--azurebloboutput | Azure Blob Storage SAS URL base path (make sure you include the container name; filename will be auto-appended) |
--teams-webhook | Microsoft Teams webhook URL for notifications |
--azure-subscription-id | Azure Subscription ID (for Azure Portal links in Teams) |
--azure-resource-group | Azure Resource Group name (for Azure Portal links in Teams) |
# Basic Azure Blob exportkrr simple -f json --azurebloboutput"https://mystorageaccount.blob.core.windows.net/reports?sv=..."# With Teams notificationskrr simple -f html \ --azurebloboutput"https://mystorageaccount.blob.core.windows.net/reports?sv=..." \ --teams-webhook"https://outlook.office.com/webhook/..." \ --azure-subscription-id"12345678-1234-1234-1234-123456789012" \ --azure-resource-group"my-resource-group"
The Teams adaptive card includes:
- 📊 Report generation announcement
- Namespace and format details
- Generation timestamp
- Storage account and container information
- Direct "View in Azure Storage" button linking to Azure Portal
Look into theexamples directory for examples on how to create a custom strategy/formatter.
We use pytest to run tests.
- Install the project manually (see above)
- Navigate to the project root directory
- Installpoetry
- Install dev dependencies:
poetry install --group dev
- Install robusta_krr as editable dependency:
pip install -e.- Run the tests:
poetry run pytest
Contributions are what make the open source community such an amazing place to learn, inspire, and create. Any contributions you make aregreatly appreciated.
If you have a suggestion that would make this better, please fork the repo and create a pull request. You can also simply open an issue with the tag "enhancement".Don't forget to give the project a star! Thanks again!
- Fork the Project
- Create your Feature Branch (
git checkout -b feature/AmazingFeature) - Commit your Changes (
git commit -m 'Add some AmazingFeature') - Push to the Branch (
git push origin feature/AmazingFeature) - Open a Pull Request
Distributed under the MIT License. SeeLICENSE.txt for more information.
If you have any questions, feel free to contactsupport@robusta.dev or message us onrobustacommunity.slack.com
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