Triage Pending Pods

Triage Pending Pods is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from bregman-arie/devops-sre-skills. It costs 16 tokens per session (456 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A troubleshooting guide for Kubernetes pods that remain Pending instead of starting. Kubernetes is a system that schedules containers, called pods, onto computers called nodes.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to inspect pod events and node capacity, classify the scheduling constraint, and choose and verify a low-risk fix.
Why use it?
It helps identify whether scheduling is blocked by resources, storage, quotas, node rules, or image downloads.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it to inspect pod events and node capacity, classify the scheduling constraint, and choose and verify a low-risk fix.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/bregman-arie/devops-sre-skills/triage-pending-pods
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 triage-pending-pods
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 Triage Pending Pods

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bregman-arie/devops-sre-skills/triage-pending-pods/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/bregman-arie/devops-sre-skills/triage-pending-pods)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bregman-arie/devops-sre-skills/triage-pending-pods"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bregman-arie/devops-sre-skills/triage-pending-pods/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 Triage Pending Pods

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bregman-arie/devops-sre-skills/triage-pending-pods"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bregman-arie/devops-sre-skills/triage-pending-pods.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 16 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 456 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 $0.00016 $0.00456
Opus 5 $0.00008 $0.00228
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00091
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00046

Measured 13d ago against content hash d7f6305fcf04, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

Triage Pending Pods 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 13d 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/triage-pending-pods/SKILL.md · 69 lines

What it actually says

When to use

Use when pods remain in Pending longer than expected.

Preconditions

  • You can access pod events and node capacity information.

Procedure

  1. Identify which pods are pending and for how long.
  2. Inspect pod scheduling events to find the exact constraint.
  3. Classify the blocker: insufficient resources, taints/tolerations, affinity, PV binding, quotas, or image pull.
  4. Confirm whether the blocker is local (one namespace/workload) or global (cluster capacity).
  5. Choose the lowest-risk remediation.

Decision points

  • Insufficient cpu/memory: scale cluster, reduce requests, or shed load.
  • taint {node.kubernetes.io/...}: add toleration only if correct.
  • pod affinity/anti-affinity: loosen rules if they are too strict.
  • unbound immediate PersistentVolumeClaims: investigate storage class/provisioner.
  • exceeded quota: adjust quota or reduce consumption.

Verification

  • Pods transition from Pending to Running.
  • Scheduling events stop reporting the constraint.

Rollback / undo

  • Revert scheduling policy changes (affinity/tolerations) if they increase blast radius.
  • Revert quota changes if they cause noisy neighbor impact.

Escalation

  • Platform team for cluster capacity or storage provisioner issues.
  • Service owner for incorrect requests/affinity rules.

Examples

kubectl -n <ns> get pod <pod>
kubectl -n <ns> describe pod <pod>
kubectl get nodes
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. 13d ago First seen · 69 lines · 16 tokens per session scan A d7f6305fcf04

Subscribe to this mod's changes

Triage Pending Pods 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 16 tokens to every session and 456 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.

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