Beyond the Basics - Advanced OpenShift Troubleshooting Techniques

Welcome to Red Hat One 2026 and this exciting, hands-on, lab experience. Throughout this lab, we will explore a wide variety of tools available to analyze, search and debug OpenShift cluster data to find patterns, issues and other useful information that will help you engage with your customers.

This lab does not use a running OpenShift cluster, it instead focus on offline debugging using common and easy to collect files our customers provide when they run into issues.

openshift-logo

Lab structure

This lab is broken down into 9 unique modules that explore a variety of tools. There is no specific ordering to move between each module, but we do recommend you review Module 1 and Module 2 first.

You must review Module 6 before moving on to the rest of the OVN sections.

Once you have reviewed Module 1 and Module 2, feel free to continue to Module 3 or pick one that interests you the most.

  1. Module 1 introduces all of the tools we will be using

  2. Module 2 does a deeper dive on the functionality in the omc tool

  3. Module 3 uses ocp_insights.py to triage an OpenShift Cluster

  4. Module 4 uses etcd-ocp-diag.py to review etcd logs for performance related issues

  5. Module 5 uses the kubectl-dev_tool to explore a cluster with an overloaded OpenShift API

  6. Module 6 introduces the OVN environment

  7. Module 7 uses ovn-trace and ovn-nbctl to debug why pods in the same namespace can not communicate

  8. Module 8 uses ovn-trace and ovn-nbctl to debug why some traffic between namespaces works and some is failing

  9. Module 9 uses ovn-trace and ovn-nbctl to debug why a VirtualMachine on a secondary network can only reach certain external websites