if You're getting alerts about high resource usage in your cluster. How would you check which worker node is under the heaviest load?

If I’m getting alerts about high resource usage in the cluster, the first thing I do is check the overall resource consumption at the node level to identify which worker node is under heavy load.

I start by using the Kubernetes command-line tool to check resource usage per node. Specifically, I use the kubectl top nodes command. This gives me a summary of CPU and memory usage for each worker node in the cluster.

I look for nodes where the usage is approaching or exceeding the allocated limits. If one node is significantly higher than others, that’s likely the bottleneck.

Once I identify the overloaded node, I drill down further to see which pods are running on it—this helps me understand what’s contributing to the high usage. I might also check if there are any DaemonSets or misconfigured workloads that are unnecessarily consuming resources on that node.

In environments with monitoring tools like Grafana and Prometheus, I’ll also check the dashboards to visualize resource trends and see if the load is temporary or sustained. That helps in deciding whether to reschedule workloads, increase node capacity, or implement autoscaling.

So overall, my approach combines both real-time CLI checks and visual monitoring to quickly pinpoint and address the issue.