Tailing few lines from huge logs of kubectl logs -f

Try kubectl logs -f pod --tail=10

To fetch tail lines from logs of a pod with multi containers.

kubectl logs <pod name> --all-containers=true --tail=10

To fetch tail lines from logs of pods within an application:

kubectl logs --selector app=<your application> --tail=10

(ex:if your application has 3 pods then output of above command can be 30 logs 10 of each pod logs)

In a cluster best practices are to gather all logs in a single point through an aggregator and analyze them with a dedicated tool. For that reason in K8S, log command is quite basic.

Anyway kubectl logs -h shows some options useful for you:

# Display only the most recent 20 lines of output in pod nginx
kubectl logs --tail=20 nginx

# Show all logs from pod nginx written in the last hour
kubectl logs --since=1h nginx

Some tools with your requirements (and more) are available on github, some of which are:

• https://github.com/boz/kail

• https://github.com/wercker/stern