kubectl get events is the first place most people look when a pod misbehaves. Kubernetes events tell you exactly what's happening in your cluster (pod scheduling failures, image pull errors, OOM kills), but by default they disappear from etcd after 60 minutes.

This guide walks through why that's a problem and how to export events to the tools your team already uses.

What are Kubernetes events?

Every time something happens in your cluster, Kubernetes creates an Event object. A pod gets scheduled, a container crashes, a volume fails to mount. Events are first-class API resources, same as Pods or Deployments.

Here's what one looks like:

apiVersion : v1 kind : Event metadata : name : my-app-pod.17a6f8e2c namespace : production reason : BackOff message : " Back-off restarting failed container" type : Warning involvedObject : kind : Pod name : my-app-pod namespace : production count : 15 firstTimestamp : " 2026-03-07T10:00:00Z" lastTimestamp : " 2026-03-07T10:15:00Z"

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