Diagnose ImagePullBackOff

Diagnose ImagePullBackOff is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from bregman-arie/devops-sre-skills. It costs 20 tokens per session (436 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A troubleshooting procedure for Kubernetes pods stuck in ImagePullBackOff or ErrImagePull, statuses that mean Kubernetes cannot download a container image.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to inspect pod events, verify image tags or digests, check image-pull secrets and service accounts, test registry access, and safely revert to a known-good image.
Why use it?
It identifies whether the image name, credentials, network connection, DNS, or certificate is preventing the download.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to inspect pod events, verify image tags or digests, check image-pull secrets and service accounts, test registry access, and safely revert to a known-good image.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/bregman-arie/devops-sre-skills/diagnose-imagepullbackoff
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add bregman-arie/devops-sre-skills --skill diagnose-imagepullbackoff
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bregman-arie/devops-sre-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for Diagnose ImagePullBackOff

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bregman-arie/devops-sre-skills/diagnose-imagepullbackoff/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/bregman-arie/devops-sre-skills/diagnose-imagepullbackoff)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bregman-arie/devops-sre-skills/diagnose-imagepullbackoff"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bregman-arie/devops-sre-skills/diagnose-imagepullbackoff/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for Diagnose ImagePullBackOff

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bregman-arie/devops-sre-skills/diagnose-imagepullbackoff"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bregman-arie/devops-sre-skills/diagnose-imagepullbackoff.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 20 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 436 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00020 $0.00436
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.00218
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00087
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00044

Measured 9d ago against content hash 240bb0f98e63, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

Diagnose ImagePullBackOff scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/kubernetes/diagnose-imagepullbackoff/SKILL.md · 67 lines

What it actually says

When to use

Use when a pod is stuck in ImagePullBackOff or ErrImagePull.

Preconditions

  • You have read access to the namespace.
  • You can identify the image reference from pod spec or describe output.

Procedure

  1. Confirm the failing image and container.
  2. Read the event message for the exact pull error (404/401/timeout/TLS).
  3. Validate the image name/tag/digest exists (out-of-band via registry).
  4. Validate image pull secrets and service account configuration.
  5. Validate network egress/DNS/TLS to the registry.

Decision points

  • not found: wrong tag/digest or repo path.
  • unauthorized: missing/incorrect credentials or secret reference.
  • i/o timeout: network path, proxy, firewall, or registry outage.
  • x509: certificate chain/mitm/proxy issues.

Verification

  • New pods progress to Running without pull errors.
  • Events stop showing pull failures.

Rollback / undo

  • Revert image reference to the last known-good tag/digest.
  • Revert service account/secret references if changed.

Escalation

  • Registry team/vendor if the registry is down or auth is broken broadly.
  • Platform/network team for cluster-wide DNS/egress/TLS issues.

Examples

kubectl -n <ns> get pod <pod>
kubectl -n <ns> describe pod <pod>
Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 67 lines · 20 tokens per session scan A 240bb0f98e63

Subscribe to this mod's changes

Diagnose ImagePullBackOff is a skill published in the GitHub repository bregman-arie/devops-sre-skills (22 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 20 tokens to every session and 436 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.