Lens 2024.9.300059-latest - Release

The latest update to Lens introduces a host of enhancements that transform how you interact with Kubernetes, making the management of workloads more intuitive and efficient than ever. Read the full announcement blog post here.

Here’s what you can expect:

  • Revamped UI/UX: Experience our completely redesigned user interface, which promotes clarity and productivity. Every aspect, from navigation to data presentation, is optimized to enhance your user experience.
  • Unified Navigator: Streamline your operations with our new navigator that integrates all cluster and resource management into a single, efficient interface. This reduces context switching and saves time, making your workflow smoother.
  • Tabbed Navigation: Increase your efficiency with the ability to work in multiple tabbed views simultaneously. This feature allows for quicker task switching and better multitasking capabilities within the Lens environment.
  • Enhanced Details Panel: We’ve reorganized and visually enhanced the details panel to highlight essential information more clearly, making it easier to digest critical data at a glance.
  • Advanced Metrics View: Gain deeper insights with improved metrics views offering real-time and historical data. The innovative Event Overlay feature provides a simultaneous view of cluster events and metrics, crucial for effective troubleshooting and performance tuning.
  • Performance and Stability Enhancements: We have made extensive performance improvements across various areas and addressed hundreds of bugs. These changes contribute to a more robust, faster, and more reliable Lens experience, ensuring smoother daily operations.
  • Direct AWS EKS Integration: Connecting to AWS EKS clusters is now straightforward with direct discovery and access, fully respecting existing security and IAM configurations, ensuring a hassle-free integration. (Lens Pro feature)
  • Improved Teamwork: Renovated teamwork management to share Lens Spaces and Clusters through a smoother, simpler process. Consolidated view to access your shared cluster faster in the same unified way that other clusters are accessed. (Lens Pro feature)
  • Enhanced Security Center: Cleaner Security Center with a more consistent look and feel that lets you focus on finding security vulnerabilities easier. Improved support for Trivy, no matter how it was installed in your cluster. (Lens Pro feature)
  • Better Accessibility: Improved keyboard navigation to access every section within the app with proper feedback and smoother transitions.

Other enhancements and bug fixes:

  • Improved namespace selector providing more control through regular expressions.
  • Fixed CPU/Memory consumption indicators in the Node Details panel.
  • Implemented multiple performance improvements to load Kube resources faster in each tab.
  • Added consistent navigation through different Kubernetes resources.
  • Implemented keyboard shortcuts to navigate through the tab history.
  • Improved Trivy detection to showcase security reports.
  • Fixed pod shell failures on Windows.
  • Fixed clickable links when shown in the terminal.
  • Enhanced highlighting when searching through logs.
  • Adjusted the behavior of the toolbar when inspecting logs from Pods, ReplicaSets, and Deployments.
  • Removed managedFields from the editor when updating Kubernetes resources.
  • Fixed the indication of default IngressClass and supported removal of the default class.
  • Added new timeframes to the metrics charts.
  • Fixed metrics charts not updating to new sources when settings are changed.
  • Added support to display basic metrics based just on the metrics-server.
  • Fixed bugs in time ranges when zooming in and out from the chart.
  • Fixed display of rules in the Ingress table.
  • Automatically disconnect from clusters when switching to different user accounts.
  • Automatically remove port-forwards created when disconnecting from clusters.
  • Display the region where the Lens Space agent is connected directly in the navigator.
  • Added an indication to the navigator when a Lens Space agent is not deployed to a cluster.
  • Fixed app crashing on MacOS when encrypted stores are reset.

Feature Deprecation and Removal:

In our commitment to delivering high-quality and relevant updates, we are streamlining Lens Desktop by removing features that no longer meet our users’ evolving needs. This approach allows us to focus on developing new and enhanced functionalities that offer more significant benefits. Here are the features that are being deprecated and removed:

  • Lens Desktop Kubernetes (LDK): Given its limited use and the challenges it presents, particularly on Windows platforms, we are deprecating LDK. Alternatives like Minikube and Kind provide a more reliable and flexible Kubernetes environment, which better serves our users’ requirements.
  • Local Image Scanning in Security Center: Due to its low usage and inconsistent performance across different cluster types, we are deprecating this feature. We will continue to focus on enhancing the core functionalities of the Security Center to better support your security needs.

These features will be unavailable to new users but remain accessible to existing users until their complete removal in the coming months. We encourage you to start transitioning to alternative solutions, and we are here to assist you during this change.

Known Issues:

  • Auto-Connect fails sometimes after sleep mode
  • Refreshing Lens by using ‘CMD+R’ on macOS can break UI
  • Setting is not persisted if input focus is not removed before closing the settings tab
  • Opening a Custom Resource main view tab sometimes doesn’t reveal in navigator if opened from the Definitions page
  • Slow Reconnection to AWS EKS Cluster After Sleep Mode (token still valid)
  • Spamming cluster tabs creates empty grey tab
  • Shortcuts for tab navigation do not work when cluster tab is focused
  • Closing a tab does not terminate Terminal sessions or processes
  • Command Palette styles are broken
  • Teamwork and LDK is not working for new Lens installations until .k8slens folder is created in the home folder
  • On Windows the autoupdate might miss files, the workaround is to uninstall and install Lens again

the search is not working properly,

I am searching for -ne-, irrelevant records are listed as well
image

ingress rules column is hidden, but the row does not resize itself

Hi @tuncay , thanks for reporting these issues, we highly appreciate the feedback. We noticed the ingress column problem as well and are arranging a fix soon. In regards to the search bug, it is partially new to us, so thanks again for reporting. I just recorded a bug ticket so our engineering team improve the behavior.

Our search looks through labels and annotations of your pods, as we acknowledge that information there is valuable to Kubernetes operators, and dashes - are ignored by our algorithm, so that might be the reason behind the results in your search. However, this gives us an indication that some UX improvements might be required to expose this functionality better

hello @dechegaray , i love the revamped navigator, but unless I´m missing something, i think you guys removed the option to ctrl + f cluster names, right?
Also, i realized that its easy to end up with multiple clusters’ opened at the same time. could you also add a button to collapse all?

@mario.martinez hi, thank you for your feedback. I’ve added the collapse button to our backlog, and we’re considering the search feature for Navigator also.

The new cluster navigation is awful. The repetition of all sub items that can be individually expanded makes for a terrible navigation experience. I only manage 3 clusters and I hate this already.

Also the new UI is extremely slow at loading anything with more resources… It takes almost 10 seconds to load 600 pods for all namespace.

I uninstalled after one day and went back to the old 2023 version.

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Hello there, thanks for providing your feedback.

We are aware of the performance issues when loading new Kube resources, and the team is working hard to provide a patch that will improve this behavior considerably. Our aim is to cut the loading times so when subsequent resources for the same cluster are open, the operation feels instant (as it was in the previous version of Lens).

We are also introducing new UX improvements soon, that will allow users to jump between clusters easier and have better control of the new navigation sidebar.

1 Like

@dechegaray Thanks for the update on performance issues. It’s been a struggle to perform daily work tasks with the latest beta. I’m looking forward to the next version. The excellent features of the newer betas make it worth my time to wait a little bit for the screens to load. Thank you!

I’m glad that I had the previous version download in place, so I could easily rollback. Navigation and UI of new version could definitely be better, the old version looks cleaner and simpler (It is actually so much better and I can really see it only after the new shiny version experience).

The bugs with state updates/refresh and general feeling of slowness and lagginess is really annoying (and awful).

1 Like