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---
title: "Six Headlamp Plugins Nobody Asked For"
date: 2026-03-07
author: Privileged Escalation
type: blog
status: draft
---
# Six Headlamp Plugins Nobody Asked For
There's a particular kind of optimism that only exists in open source. It's the belief that if you build something genuinely useful, put it on GitHub, list it on Artifact Hub, write actual documentation, and then wait — someone will eventually find it.
We're currently in the "wait" phase.
## What We Actually Built
Privileged Escalation makes [Headlamp](https://headlamp.dev/) plugins. If you don't know what Headlamp is: it's a CNCF-listed Kubernetes dashboard that was designed to be extended. If you don't know what Kubernetes is, this blog post is going to be a rough ride.
We have six plugins. Each one takes something you'd normally do with `kubectl`, a terminal, and quiet desperation, and puts it in a web UI that your teammates might actually use.
**[headlamp-polaris-plugin](https://github.com/privilegedescalation/headlamp-polaris-plugin)** — Surfaces Fairwinds Polaris audit results directly in Headlamp. Cluster score in the app bar, per-namespace breakdowns, exemption management from the UI instead of annotation YAML editing. Recently hit v0.6.0 with dark mode support, because apparently that's what it takes to be taken seriously in 2026.
**[headlamp-tns-csi-plugin](https://github.com/privilegedescalation/headlamp-tns-csi-plugin)** — TrueNAS CSI driver visibility and storage benchmarking via kbench. If you've ever wondered whether your NFS share is actually performing the way iX Systems promised, this is the plugin that tells you the uncomfortable truth.
**[headlamp-rook-plugin](https://github.com/privilegedescalation/headlamp-rook-plugin)** — Rook-Ceph cluster health, pool status, and CSI driver monitoring. For people who chose distributed storage and now live with the consequences.
**[headlamp-sealed-secrets-plugin](https://github.com/privilegedescalation/headlamp-sealed-secrets-plugin)** — Bitnami Sealed Secrets management with client-side RSA-OAEP and AES-256-GCM encryption. Your plaintext never leaves the browser. We're fairly proud of this one, which is why it hurts that it has zero stars.
**[headlamp-intel-gpu-plugin](https://github.com/privilegedescalation/headlamp-intel-gpu-plugin)** — Intel GPU device visibility and resource monitoring. For the subset of people running Intel GPUs in Kubernetes, which is a smaller group than Intel's marketing department would like.
**[headlamp-kube-vip-plugin](https://github.com/privilegedescalation/headlamp-kube-vip-plugin)** — kube-vip virtual IP and load balancer visibility. Because sometimes you just need to know if the VIP is actually where it's supposed to be.
## Why Headlamp Plugins
The Kubernetes dashboard space is... let's call it "stratified." There are expensive commercial options that do everything. There are free options that do almost nothing. And then there's Headlamp, which does a reasonable amount and lets you extend it.
We chose the extension path. Every plugin installs through Headlamp's native plugin system — no separate deployments, no new URLs to bookmark, no "please also install this sidecar that needs its own RBAC." You add a plugin and it appears in the sidebar. That's it.
This matters because the alternative is what most teams actually do: they `kubectl` their way through everything, pipe JSON through `jq`, and call it observability. It works. It's also miserable if you're trying to onboard anyone who doesn't have muscle memory for `kubectl get pods -n rook-ceph -o jsonpath='{.items[*].status.phase}'`.
## The Honest Part
We launched all six plugins in the same week. Combined star count across all repos: zero. Combined fork count: one, and we're not entirely sure it was intentional.
Our CI is sometimes in a state that could charitably be described as "aspirational." We filed a bug against ourselves about E2E tests that have never passed because we haven't set up the test infrastructure yet. We committed LICENSE badges to READMEs before we committed the actual LICENSE files.
This is normal. This is what early open source looks like before the narrative gets cleaned up. We'd rather be honest about it than pretend we emerged fully formed with 200 stars and a contributor covenant.
## What's Next
We're working on getting every plugin listed on Artifact Hub with proper metadata, fixing the CI pipelines that are currently failing for reasons ranging from "missing secrets" to "format check disagreements," and writing the kind of documentation that makes people confident enough to actually install something.
If you run Headlamp and any of these plugins sound useful, try one. If something breaks, file an issue. If it works and you like it, a star would be nice. We're not above admitting that.
All plugins are Apache-2.0 licensed. All repos are at [github.com/privilegedescalation](https://github.com/privilegedescalation).