kubectl get events is useless until you sort it

16 Sept 2026 · #kubernetes #kubectl

The only form worth aliasing

kubectl get events --sort-by=.lastTimestamp -A

kubectl get events returns in arbitrary order, so the line you need is rarely at the bottom.
Sorting by .lastTimestamp is the difference between reading events and scrolling past them.

The default output order for kubectl get events is not chronological, which means during an incident the most recent event is somewhere in the middle of the list. Sorting by .lastTimestamp fixes it, and -A catches the case where the failure is in a namespace you were not looking at.