GKE Autopilot Cluster Not Displaying Anything in UI

Question

I have a Kubernetes cluster on GKE Autopilot that works in every way: I can view everything with kubectl in the cloud terminal and my application is successfully running as expected. The issue is there is just about no UI on the Google Cloud Platform. I can’t see any workloads, ingress, or container logs despite being able to view the resources with kubectl. I just moved my cluster from a standard GKE cluster (where the UI worked) to an autopilot GKE cluster, am I doing something wrong? Shouldn’t GKE be able to automatically pick up resources and display them in the UI?

According to Google's documentation "All GKE Autopilot clusters are configured to send metrics and logs to Google Cloud’s operations suite without requiring any work from you. As a result, when you navigate to the GKE Dashboard, you will see your Autopilot clusters, namespaces, nodes, workloads, services, pods and containers displayed alongside all of your other GKE deployments. You get a holistic view of information including metrics, logs, events, alerts, incidents and SLOs." https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/operations/monitor-applications-gke-autopilot-gke-dashboard

Answer 1

Autopilot is a new mode of operation in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) that is designed to reduce the operational cost of managing clusters, optimize your clusters for production, and yield higher workload availability. The mode of operation refers to the level of flexibility, responsibility, and control that you have over your cluster. With Autopilot all node management operations are eliminated. This maximizes your cluster efficiency and helps to provide a stronger security posture.

With Autopilot, you no longer have to monitor the health of your nodes or calculate the amount of compute capacity that your workloads require. Autopilot supports most Kubernetes APIs, tools, and its rich ecosystem. You stay within GKE without having to interact with the Compute Engine APIs, CLIs, or UI, as the nodes are not accessible through Compute Engine, like they are in Standard mode. You pay only for the CPU, memory, and storage that your Pods request while they are running.

Using Autopilot, GKE provisions and manages the cluster's underlying infrastructure, including nodes and node pools, giving you an optimized cluster with a hands-off experience.

As indicated, GKE fully manages nodes and node pools in the Autopilot mode. Therefore, nodes are not accessible through Compute Engine, like they are in Standard mode.

Note : Converting Standard clusters to Autopilot mode and converting Autopilot clusters to Standard mode is not supported.

Refer Autopilot Overview for information.