[Bug]: unexpected container restart

[NISHANTVIVEK]

Bug Description

During clean install, the operator liveness probe on http://:8080/healthy fails with "connection refused" because the health/metrics server is not yet listening on port 8080. The kubelet kills the first container instance (Exit Code 137) and restarts it. On the second instance the health server becomes ready ~11s after start and the pod stays healthy (Restart Count 1) .

Port:          8080/TCP
Host Port:     0/TCP
Args:
  /opt/strimzi/bin/cluster_operator_run.sh
State:          Running
  Started:      Mon, 31 Aug 2026 11:16:31 GMT
Last State:     Terminated
  Reason:       Error
  Exit Code:    137
  Started:      Mon, 31 Aug 2026 11:14:47 GMT
  Finished:     Mon, 31 Aug 2026 11:16:30 GMT
Ready:          True
Restart Count:  1
Limits:
  cpu:                1
  ephemeral-storage:  100Mi
  memory:             384Mi
Requests:
  cpu:                       200m
  ephemeral-storage:         100Mi
  memory:                    384Mi
Liveness:                    http-get http://[:8080]/healthy delay=10s timeout=5s period=30s #success=1 #failure=3
Readiness:                   http-get http://[:8080]/ready delay=10s timeout=5s period=30s #success=1 #failure=3

Events:
Type Reason Age From Message

---

Warning Unhealthy 11m (x3 over 12m) kubelet Liveness probe failed: Get "http://10.130.2.218:8080/healthy": dial tcp 10.130.2.218:8080: connect: connection refused
Normal Killing 11m kubelet Container backend-operator failed liveness probe, will be restarted
Warning Unhealthy 10m (x4 over 11m) kubelet Readiness probe failed: Get "http://10.130.2.218:8080/ready": dial tcp 10.130.2.218:8080: connect: connection refused
Normal Created 10m (x2 over 12m) kubelet Created container: backend-operator
Normal Started 10m (x2 over 12m) kubelet Started container backend-operator

Steps to reproduce

No response

Expected behavior

No response

Strimzi version

0.45

Kubernetes version

1.34

Installation method

No response

Infrastructure

No response

Configuration files and logs

No response

Additional context

No response

[scholzj]

A good start would be to share the full logs. You can also try to play with the memory and CPU configurations. It is hard to guess what is going on without the full log. It could be CPU starvation, some issues with the Kubernetes API, etc.