id: cluster-scheduling-capacity-triage name: Cluster Scheduling Capacity Triage version: v2 description: Diagnose Pending Pods and FailedScheduling from allocatable capacity, requests, quota, taints, affinity, and topology evidence. triggers: [pending pods, failedscheduling, unschedulable pods, insufficient cpu, insufficient memory, cluster capacity] resourceTypes: [cluster, pod] alertNames: [ClusterPendingPodsP1, PodPendingTooLong] metricNames: [kube.cluster.pending_pods, kube.pod.pending] runbookIds: [runbook-cluster-capacity] categories: [capacity] applicableTasks: [QUERY_LOGS, QUERY_METRICS] tags: [kubernetes, scheduler, pending, capacity, quota] maxRisk: LOW toolWhitelist:

• knowledge.searchSop
• kubernetes.describeResource
• kubernetes.getPods
• kubernetes.describeWorkload
• kubernetes.queryLogs
• kubernetes.queryEvents
• kubernetes.queryPodLogs
• kubernetes.queryMetricsContext
• prometheus.queryRange
• prometheus.instantQuery
• prometheus.rangeQuery
• alerts.getActiveAlerts
• changes.getRecentChanges
• alertmanager.listAlerts

Cluster Scheduling Capacity Triage

Diagnostic objective

Explain cluster-level Pending Pods by separating real capacity shortage from quota, taint, affinity, topology, volume, and scheduler constraints.

Required live evidence

Collect Pending Pod count and age, FailedScheduling reasons, requests and allocatable capacity by node, quota, taints/tolerations, affinity/topology, pod density, volume binding, autoscaler state, and recent changes.

Decision branches

• Insufficient CPU or memory spans nodes: verify requests and usable headroom before declaring shortage.
• Quota or limit range rejects one namespace: isolate it from cluster-wide capacity.
• Taint, affinity, topology, or volume rules block placement: identify the exact constraint and owner.
• Pods are Pending because a workload is failing after scheduling: hand off to a Pod or Deployment Skill.

Safe next step

Use the runbook to rank blockers; propose capacity or scheduling changes as approved work.

Prohibited actions

Do not add nodes, relax quota, remove taints, rewrite affinity, evict workloads, or disable the scheduler from this Skill.

Recovery and escalation

Require Pending backlog and scheduling failures to drain while headroom remains stable. Escalate for critical unschedulable workloads, exhausted failure domains, or control-plane scheduling degradation.