Quick Start
Up and running in 5 minutes
Follow these six steps to connect your first Kubernetes cluster, explore the dashboard, and start optimizing your infrastructure.
Create Your Account
Sign up for a free Substrate account. No credit card required. You'll get instant access to the dashboard and all platform features.
Sign up at substratecore.com/signup -- takes less than 30 seconds.
Create a Project
Projects help you organize clusters, deployments, and team members. Create your first project from the dashboard sidebar.
substrate project create --name "my-app" --description "Production workloads"Projects support team-level RBAC, so you can control who has access to what.
Connect a Cluster
Register an existing Kubernetes cluster or provision a new one on AWS EKS, Azure AKS, or Google GKE. Registration takes a single command.
substrate cluster register \
--name "prod-us-east" \
--kubeconfig ~/.kube/config \
--context my-clusterSubstrate supports any Kubernetes cluster -- managed, self-hosted, or on-premise.
Explore the Dashboard
Once your cluster is connected, the dashboard shows nodes, namespaces, deployments, and resource utilization in real time.
Navigate to your cluster to see nodes, pods, events, and resource metrics at a glance.
Enable Monitoring
Turn on real-time resource tracking to get live CPU, memory, and network metrics across all your nodes and pods.
substrate monitoring enable --cluster "prod-us-east"Monitoring uses WebSocket connections for instant updates -- no polling delays.
Optimize Costs
Enable the autoscaling engine to analyze your workloads and generate rightsizing recommendations. Review and approve optimizations from the dashboard.
substrate autoscaler enable \
--cluster "prod-us-east" \
--analysis-window 7dMost teams see their first cost savings recommendations within 24 hours.
Ready to get started?
Create your free account and connect your first cluster in under five minutes.
Start free