OOMKilled is a classic day-2 rabbit hole: events, limits, restarts, then a risky scale or edit. kprompt turns the investigation prompt into a reviewable plan before apply.
Originally published at https://kprompt.ai/blog/kubernetes-oomkilled.
OOMKilled is one of the most common “the app is broken” signals in Kubernetes — and one of the easiest to misread. The Pod may still show Running. Restarts climb. Logs look fine until they stop mid-request. Someone raises the memory limit “a bit,” the Deployment rolls, and two hours later it happens again. Or worse: they remove the limit entirely and the node starts evicting neighbors.
This guide is the operator ladder for memory kills: how to confirm OOMKilled, how requests and limits differ, what kubectl shows, and how to apply a bounded fix with a reviewable plan. kprompt's explain path detects OOM findings and can propose a memory patch — still behind approval, because raising limits is a real cluster change.
What OOMKilled actually means
