Monitoring Docker

Monitoring Docker

by Russ McKendrick
Released December 2015
Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
ISBN: 9781785882753

Read it now on the O’Reilly learning platform with a 10-day free trial.

O’Reilly members get unlimited access to books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial

Book description

Monitor your Docker containers and their apps using various native and third-party tools with the help of this exclusive guide!

About This Book

  • Get the only book that covers multiple methods to monitoring Docker Containers -your one-stop solution to all your Docker monitoring needs
  • Learn how to implement third-party tools such as Datalog, cAdvisor, and more with this example-rich, hands-on guide
  • Learn how to efficiently monitor Docker containers and get an edge over other administrators while maintaining apps on these containers

Who This Book Is For

This book is for DevOps engineers and system administrators who manage Docker containers and want to better manage these containers using expert techniques and methods and better maintain applications built on Docker.

What You Will Learn

  • Discover the tools built into Docker to gain an insight into your containers' performance
  • Augment Docker's built-in tools with modern tools such as cAdvisor from Google, SysDig by Draios, and Soundcloud's Prometheus
  • Integrate the monitoring of your containers with more traditional monitoring solutions such as Zabbix
  • Take advantage of the various SaaS offerings from third parties to move monitoring away from your local infrastructure and into the cloud
  • Discover the various ways to ship your applications' logs from the container to a central logging service
  • Get the most out of your application and resources with the right implementation of your monitoring method

In Detail

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

Style and approach

This is an easy-to-follow guide with plenty of hands-on examples that can be executed both on your local machine and externally hosted services.

Table of contents

  1. Monitoring Docker
    1. Table of Contents
    2. Monitoring Docker
    3. Credits
    4. About the Author
    5. About the Reviewer
    6. www.PacktPub.com
      1. Support files, eBooks, discount offers, and more
        1. Why subscribe?
        2. Free access for Packt account holders
    7. Preface
      1. What this book covers
      2. What you need for this book
      3. Who this book is for
      4. Conventions
      5. Reader feedback
      6. Customer support
        1. Downloading the example code
        2. Downloading the color images of this book
        3. Errata
        4. Piracy
        5. Questions
    8. 1. Introduction to Docker Monitoring
      1. Pets, Cattle, Chickens, and Snowflakes
        1. Pets
        2. Cattle
        3. Chickens
        4. Snowflakes
        5. So what does this all mean?
      2. Docker
      3. Launching a local environment
      4. Cloning the environment
      5. Running a virtual server
      6. Halting the virtual server
      7. Summary
    9. 2. Using the Built-in Tools
      1. Docker stats
        1. Running Docker stats
      2. What just happened?
      3. What about processes?
        1. Docker top
        2. Docker exec
      4. Summary
    10. 3. Advanced Container Resource Analysis
      1. What is cAdvisor?
      2. Running cAdvisor using a container
      3. Compiling cAdvisor from source
      4. Collecting metrics
      5. The Web interface
        1. Overview
        2. Processes
        3. CPU
        4. Memory
        5. Network
        6. Filesystem
      6. Viewing container stats
        1. Subcontainers
        2. Driver status
        3. Images
      7. This is all great, what's the catch?
      8. Prometheus
        1. Launching Prometheus
        2. Querying Prometheus
        3. Dashboard
        4. The next steps
      9. Alternatives?
      10. Summary
    11. 4. A Traditional Approach to Monitoring Containers
      1. Zabbix
      2. Installing Zabbix
        1. Using containers
        2. Using vagrant
        3. Preparing our host machine
        4. The Zabbix web interface
      3. Docker metrics
        1. Create custom graphs
        2. Compare containers to your host machine
        3. Triggers
      4. Summary
    12. 5. Querying with Sysdig
      1. What is Sysdig?
      2. Installing Sysdig
      3. Using Sysdig
        1. The basics
        2. Capturing data
        3. Containers
        4. Further reading
      4. Using Csysdig
      5. Summary
    13. 6. Exploring Third Party Options
      1. A word about externally hosted services
        1. Deploying Docker in the cloud
      2. Why use a SaaS service?
      3. Sysdig Cloud
        1. Installing the agent
        2. Exploring your containers
        3. Summary and further reading
      4. Datadog
        1. Installing the agent
        2. Exploring the web interface
        3. Summary and further reading
      5. New Relic
        1. Installing the agent
        2. Exploring the web interface
        3. Summary and further reading
      6. Summary
    14. 7. Collecting Application Logs from within the Container
      1. Viewing container logs
      2. ELK Stack
        1. Starting the stack
        2. Logspout
        3. Reviewing the logs
        4. What about production?
      3. Looking at third party options
      4. Summary
    15. 8. What Are the Next Steps?
      1. Some scenarios
        1. Pets, Cattle, Chickens, and Snowflakes
          1. Pets
          2. Cattle
          3. Chickens
          4. Snowflakes
        2. Scenario one
        3. Scenario two
        4. Scenario three
      2. A little more about alerting
        1. Chickens
        2. Cattle and Pets
        3. Sending alerts
      3. Keeping up
      4. Summary
    16. Index

Product information

  • Title: Monitoring Docker
  • Author(s): Russ McKendrick
  • Release date: December 2015
  • Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
  • ISBN: 9781785882753