[markbnj]

Depends on why it is getting restarted. If it's exceeding mem limits and being oomkilled that's the kernel, not k8s. If PID 1 inside the namespace is terminating then k8s will restart the pod. No way to prevent that I am aware of, but presumably you can't do much debugging once that happens anyway. If the process is failing liveness probes and getting terminated for being unhealthy probably the simplest approach is just to patch away those probes until you have the workload stable.

[nodesocket]

Yes failing liveness probe.

[anirudhrx]

Liveness probes are used by the kubelet to restart the underlying container and are independent of the deployment object. This has come up before in https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/57187 but sadly, isn't possible yet. Your best bet is to create a new pod and hope for repro, or one way might be to have a configmap that is mounted into the pod that contains a debug flag that your liveness probe also looks at - i.e. "debug == true || curl localhost:6789". Not a clean solution but may work for the interim.