Expected Pods After Installing Calico (Tigera Operator) – Are These Correct?

General Discussions
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Hi everyone,

I’m installing Calico using the Tigera Operator and wanted to confirm what pods are expected to be running after a successful installation.

I followed the official Calico documentation and applied the manifests in the following order:

kubectl create -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/projectcalico/calico/v3.28.2/manifests/tigera-operator.yaml

kubectl create -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/projectcalico/calico/v3.28.2/manifests/custom-resources.yaml

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/projectcalico/calico/v3.28.2/manifests/tigera-operator.yaml

After that, I checked the pods in the calico-system namespace:

kubectl get pod -n calico-system

Output:

NAME                                       READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
calico-kube-controllers-664458b5d6-j6r9n   1/1     Running   0          47s
calico-node-7p9hm                          0/1     Running   0          43s
calico-node-slzjc                          0/1     Running   0          43s
calico-typha-545f98fc-64wrx                1/1     Running   0          45s
csi-node-driver-58dzv                      2/2     Running   0          47s
csi-node-driver-5sqqq                      2/2     Running   0          47s

Questions:

  1. Are these the expected pods when Calico is installed via the Tigera Operator?

  2. Is it normal for calico-node pods to show 0/1 initially even though the status is Running?

  3. Are there any additional pods I should expect in calico-system for a standard installation?

  4. What are the key checks to confirm Calico is fully healthy (beyond pod status)?

Any clarification or best practices would be really helpful. Thanks in advance!