What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introduction to Docker Monitoring, discusses how different it is to monitor containers compared to more traditional servers such as virtual machines, bare metal machines, and cloud instances (Pets versus Cattle and Chickens versus Snowflakes). This chapter also details the operating systems covered in the examples later in this book and also gives a little information on how to get a local test environment up and running using vagrant, so that installation instructions and practical examples can be easily followed.

Chapter 2, Using the Built-in Tools, helps you learn about the basic metrics you can get out of the vanilla Docker installation and how you can use them. Also, we will understand how to get real-time statistics on our running containers, how to use commands that are familiar to us, and how to get information on the processes that are launched as part of each container.

Chapter 3, Advanced Container Resource Analysis, introduces cAdvisor from Google, which adds a lot more precision to the basic tools provided by Docker. You will also learn how to install cAdvisor and start collecting metrics.

Chapter 4, A Traditional Approach to Monitoring Containers, looks at a traditional tool for monitoring services. By the end of this chapter, you should know your way around Zabbix and the various ways you can monitor your containers.

Chapter 5, Querying with Sysdig, describes Sysdig as "an open source, system-level exploration tool to capture system state and activity from a running Linux instance, then save, filter, and analyze it." In this chapter, you will learn how to use Sysdig to both view your containers' performance metrics in real time and also record sessions to query later.

Chapter 6, Exploring Third Party Options, walks you through a few of the Software as a Service (SaaS) options that are available, why you would use them, and how to install their clients on the host server.

Chapter 7, Collecting Application Logs from within the Container, looks at how we can get the content of the log files for the applications running within our containers to a central location so that they are available even if you have to destroy and replace a container.

Chapter 8, What Are the Next Steps?, looks at the next steps you can take in monitoring your containers by talking about the benefits of adding alerting to your monitoring. Also, we will cover some different scenarios and look at which type of monitoring is appropriate for each of them.