Shell helpers to watch your kubectl pods across namespaces

Working across several Kubernetes namespaces gets tedious quickly. You end up running the same kubectl get pods -n <namespace> over and over, just to check whether your pods are healthy after a deploy.

A small zsh function fixes this. Add the following to your ~/.zshrc:

getpods() {
  local match=${1:-abhijeet}
  local namespaces=(dashboard frontend-graphql sme-dashboard api ufh pgos onboarding asv)
  local output=""
  for ns in $namespaces; do
    output+="$(kubectl get pods -n $ns | grep $match)\n"
  done
  echo $output | column -t
}

Now getpods prints a single, aligned table of pods across all the namespaces you care about, filtered by name. The first argument is optional, so a bare getpods falls back to your default match (mine is my username, since our pod names are prefixed with the developer who deployed them).

To keep an eye on a rollout, wrap it with watch:

watchpods() {
  watch "zsh -c 'source ~/.zshrc; getpods ${1:-abhijeet}'"
}

watch runs the command every 2 seconds by default.

Two things to customize for your setup:

• Replace the namespaces list with the namespaces you actually deploy to.
• Change the default match (abhijeet) to whatever convention your team uses for naming pods, branches, or feature environments.

Once these are in place, checking on your pods is a single command instead of eight.

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