Debug Assistant

Launch an ephemeral debug pod alongside a target pod to diagnose network, DNS, and filesystem issues.

Added in v4.8.0. Use Debug Assistant to launch an ephemeral debug pod next to a target pod and open a shell with debugging tools preinstalled.

When to use Debug Assistant

The target image is minimal, such as distroless or scratch, and has no shell.
You need tools like tcpdump, dig, curl, or nc that are not in the target image.
You need to inspect mounted volumes or the pod's network namespace without touching the pod itself.
You are debugging a CrashLoopBackOff and the pod never stays up long enough for kubectl exec.

From Pods or Workloads, choose Debug on the pod you want to inspect.

Choose whether to share the process namespace, the network namespace, and mounted volumes.

Dockerman creates the pod and waits for it to become Ready before it opens the terminal.

The debug pod opens in a Dockerman terminal tab.

Dockerman ships three built-in presets that pre-configure the debug port and protocol for common runtimes:

Select a preset when launching the debug pod to skip manual port configuration.

Tool	Purpose
`bash`, `sh`	Shells
`ps`, `top`, `htop`	Process inspection
`netstat`, `ss`	Connection state
`tcpdump`	Packet capture
`curl`, `wget`	HTTP probing
`dig`, `nslookup`	DNS resolution
`nc`	Raw TCP and UDP checks
`vim`, `less`	File inspection
`strace`	Syscall tracing when the kernel allows it

The debug pod is ephemeral. Close the terminal tab or exit the shell when you are done, and Dockerman cleans it up for you.