Docker daemon permission for writing metrics from exporters.A Linux server running Docker with latest version of Docker Compose.To follow along with all components, you will need: Understanding exactly how applications consume resources empowers more efficient operation, automated responses, and helps prevent instability from overutilization or resource bottlenecks. Dashboarding for understanding infrastructure at a glance.Correlation between application response times and lower level characteristics.Metrics-driven alerting when thresholds are crossed.Historical trend analysis for capacity planning and optimization.Live resource usage monitoring with breakdowns per host, container, namespace.While containerization brings architectural benefits through loose coupling and portability, the environment grows increasingly complex from an operations view.īy collecting, storing and charting detailed time series metrics we regain visibility including: Establishing alerts to detect anomalies or problems.Tuning container configurations and placements based on behavior.Identifying trends and spikes in utilization to prevent over-utilization.Correlating application performance with lower-level resource metrics.Mapping which containers run on which hosts over time.Understanding how containers utilize physical resources like CPU, memory, disk and network.This ephemeral architecture introduces visibility challenges including: Why Monitor Containers and Hosts?įirst, why is monitoring so important for container infrastructure?Īs applications are packaged into portable, isolated containers, they become more distributed across fluid pools of virtualized container hosts like nodes in a cluster. We will deploy them with Docker and set up metrics ingestion pipelines, storage, querying and dashboarding to understand exactly how containers utilize host resources over time. Grafana: Feature-rich dashboards and graphs for analytics and visualizationĬollectively these tools provide end-to-end observability into Dockerized environments, from physical infrastructure up through running applications.Node Exporter: Exposes hardware and OS metrics from physical and virtual Docker server hosts.cAdvisor: A utility which collects resource usage and performance data from running containers.Prometheus: A popular open-source time series database for storing and querying numeric metrics.In this comprehensive guide, we will set up an integrated open-source monitoring stack for visualizing Docker host and container metrics using: This enables teams to troubleshoot issues proactively before they cause downstream impacts, as well as optimize usage and spending on containerized resources. Monitoring provides valuable metrics, logs and insights into how both applications and infrastructure are performing. Linux system administration, Virtualization & Cloud computing IntroductionĪs companies adopt Docker containers to achieve improved efficiency and velocity of application deployment, monitoring and observability become increasingly critical for running containers in production.

Docker node exporter prometheus