The companion post to this one, "What the VPA Recommender Is Actually Computing," walks through the decay-weighted percentile math, the OOM bump, and the calculator that lets you punch in numbers and see what VPA would recommend. All of that is only useful once you have real numbers to punch in. This post is the practical half: where each input actually comes from in a live cluster, which command pulls it, and where the one genuinely tricky piece, historical usage samples, actually lives.
Every command below works identically whether you're on plain Kubernetes with kubectl or on OpenShift with oc. oc is a superset of kubectl, so anywhere you see kubectl you can substitute oc and get the same result, plus a couple of OpenShift-specific extras noted along the way.
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