Book Image

Monitoring Docker

By : Russ McKendrick
Book Image

Monitoring Docker

By: Russ McKendrick

Overview of this book

This book will show you how monitoring containers and keeping a keen eye on the working of applications helps improve the overall performance of the applications that run on Docker. With the increased adoption of Docker containers, the need to monitor which containers are running, what resources they are consuming, and how these factors affect the overall performance of the system has become the need of the moment. This book covers monitoring containers using Docker's native monitoring functions, various plugins, as well as third-party tools that help in monitoring. Well start with how to obtain detailed stats for active containers, resources consumed, and container behavior. We also show you how to use these stats to improve the overall performance of the system. Next, you will learn how to use SysDig to both view your containers performance metrics in real time and record sessions to query later. By the end of this book, you will have a complete knowledge of how to implement monitoring for your containerized applications and make the most of the metrics you are collecting

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Monitoring Docker
Russ McKendrick
Dec, 2015 | 148 pages
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Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Monitoring Docker
Monitoring Docker
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewer
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Introduction to Docker Monitoring
Introduction to Docker Monitoring
Pets, Cattle, Chickens, and Snowflakes
Docker
Launching a local environment
Cloning the environment
Running a virtual server
Halting the virtual server
Summary
2
Using the Built-in Tools
Using the Built-in Tools
Docker stats
What just happened?
What about processes?
Summary
3
Advanced Container Resource Analysis
Advanced Container Resource Analysis
What is cAdvisor?
Running cAdvisor using a container
Compiling cAdvisor from source
Collecting metrics
The Web interface
Viewing container stats
This is all great, what's the catch?
Prometheus
Alternatives?
Summary
4
A Traditional Approach to Monitoring Containers
A Traditional Approach to Monitoring Containers
Zabbix
Installing Zabbix
Docker metrics
Summary
5
Querying with Sysdig
Querying with Sysdig
What is Sysdig?
Installing Sysdig
Using Sysdig
Using Csysdig
Summary
6
Exploring Third Party Options
Exploring Third Party Options
A word about externally hosted services
Why use a SaaS service?
Sysdig Cloud
Datadog
New Relic
Summary
7
Collecting Application Logs from within the Container
Collecting Application Logs from within the Container
Viewing container logs
ELK Stack
Looking at third party options
Summary
8
What Are the Next Steps?
What Are the Next Steps?
Some scenarios
A little more about alerting
Keeping up
Summary
Index
Index

ELK Stack

Similar to some of the technologies that we have covered in this book, an ELK stack really deserves a book by itself; in fact, there are books for each of the elements that make an ELK stack, these elements are:

  • Elasticsearch is a powerful search server, which has been developed with modern workloads in mind

  • Logstash sits between your data source and Elasticsearch services; it transforms your data in real time to a format, which Elasticsearch can understand.

  • Kibana is in front of your Elasticsearch services and allows you to query your data in a feature-rich web-based dashboard.

There are a lot of moving parts with an ELK stack, so to simplify things, we will use a prebuilt stack for the purpose of testing; however, you probably don't want to use this stack in production.

Starting the stack

Let's launch a fresh vagrant host on which to run the ELK stack:

[russ@mac ~]$ cd ~/Documents/Projects/monitoring-docker/vagrant-centos/
[russ@mac ~]$ vagrant up
Bringing machine 'default' up with...
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