Could not locate Gremlin agents for supplied targets. Check that Gremlin is running on the nodes where these targets are running

Modified on Fri, 13 Mar at 11:59 AM

In most cases, this error occurs in one of the following cases:

1. There isn't an agent installed on the targeted node. You can verify this by using a command similar to the following (any method that lists the nodes for the target application and gremlin is fine):

kubectl get pods -A -o custom-columns=NS:.metadata.namespace,POD:.metadata.name,NODE:.spec.nodeName \
| grep -E "$target-namespace|$gremlin-namespace"

The output will contain a list of nodes for the app, and a list of nodes where Gremlin agents reside. The target node should have a gremlin pod on it in order for attacks to function properly.

2. The container driver is not loading properly or is in a failed state. You can verify the container driver status by running:

gremlin check

# Here is an excerpt of gremlin check output containing container driver status; this EKS cluster uses the containerd-linux driver:

2026-03-13 15:43:03 UTC - container
====================================================
docker-linux                         : container driver: docker-linux not suitable for this system: socket not available: /var/run/docker.sock: Connection refused (os error 111)
containerd-linux                     : OK
crio-linux                           : container driver: crio-linux not suitable for this system: socket not available: /run/crio/crio.sock: Connection refused (os error 111)
Runc                                 : Error : No such file or directory (os error 2)

3. Verify that you are running a version of Gremlin that is close to latest, and that the official helm chart version used to deploy that is also recent, as system capabilities and permissions required to run the agent change over time; old helm chart versions and newer agent versions may create incompatibilities.

If the above are both nominal, please contact Gremlin support for additional assistance troubleshooting; please provide the above outputs in addition to the logs for the corresponding chao and gremlin pods.