Monitoring Docker

Russ McKendrick

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781785882753
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Cloud Computing
• Index: Computer Science

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.

Monitoring Docker

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Table of Contents

Monitoring Docker

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewer

www.PacktPub.com

Support files, eBooks, discount offers, and more

Why subscribe?

Free access for Packt account holders

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Downloading the color images of this book

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Introduction to Docker Monitoring

Pets, Cattle, Chickens, and Snowflakes

Pets

Cattle

Chickens

Snowflakes

So what does this all mean?

Docker

Launching a local environment

Cloning the environment

Running a virtual server

Halting the virtual server

Summary

2. Using the Built-in Tools

Docker stats

Running Docker stats

What just happened?

What about processes?

Docker top

Docker exec

Summary

3. Advanced Container Resource Analysis

What is cAdvisor?

Running cAdvisor using a container

Compiling cAdvisor from source

Collecting metrics

The Web interface

Overview

Processes

CPU

Memory

Network

Filesystem

Viewing container stats

Subcontainers

Driver status

Images

This is all great, what's the catch?

Prometheus

Launching Prometheus

Querying Prometheus

Dashboard

The next steps

Alternatives?

Summary

4. A Traditional Approach to Monitoring Containers

Zabbix

Installing Zabbix

Using containers

Using vagrant

Preparing our host machine

The Zabbix web interface

Docker metrics

Create custom graphs

Compare containers to your host machine

Triggers

Summary

5. Querying with Sysdig

What is Sysdig?

Installing Sysdig

Using Sysdig

The basics

Capturing data

Containers

Further reading

Using Csysdig

Summary

6. Exploring Third Party Options

A word about externally hosted services

Deploying Docker in the cloud

Why use a SaaS service?

Sysdig Cloud

Installing the agent

Exploring your containers

Summary and further reading

Datadog

Installing the agent

Exploring the web interface

Summary and further reading

New Relic

Installing the agent

Exploring the web interface

Summary and further reading

Summary

7. Collecting Application Logs from within the Container

Viewing container logs

ELK Stack

Starting the stack

Logspout

Reviewing the logs

What about production?

Looking at third party options

Summary

8. What Are the Next Steps?

Some scenarios

Pets, Cattle, Chickens, and Snowflakes

Pets

Cattle

Chickens

Snowflakes

Scenario one

Scenario two

Scenario three

A little more about alerting

Chickens

Cattle and Pets

Sending alerts

Keeping up

Summary

Index

Monitoring Docker

Copyright © 2015 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: December 2015

Production reference: 1041215

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

35 Livery Street

Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78588-275-3

www.packtpub.com

Credits

Author

Russ McKendrick

Reviewer

Marcelo Correia Pinheiro

Commissioning Editor

Veena Pagare

Acquisition Editor

Rahul Nair

Content Development Editor

Anish Sukumaran

Technical Editor

Saurabh Malhotra

Copy Editor

Trishya Hajare

Project Coordinator

Izzat Contractor

Proofreader

Safis Editing

Indexers

Mariammal Chettiyar

Priya Sane

Production Coordinator

Shantanu N. Zagade

Cover Work

Shantanu N. Zagade

About the Author

Russ McKendrick is an experienced solutions architect who has been working in IT and IT-related industries for the better part of 23 years. During his career, he has had varied responsibilities in a number of industries, ranging from looking after entire IT infrastructures to providing first line, second line, and senior support in client facing, and internal teams for corporate organizations.

He works almost exclusively with Linux, using open source systems and tools on various platforms ranging from dedicated hardware and virtual machines to public clouds.

About the Reviewer

Marcelo Correia Pinheiro is a Brazilian software engineer from Porto Alegre. He started to work as a web designer and programmer in 2000 with ASP and PHP, naturally getting in touch with the Microsoft .NET framework and Java running respective databases of choice for web applications. Since 2003, he has used Linux and UNIX-related operational systems, from Slackware to Gobo Linux, Archlinux, CentOS, Debian, and today OSX, having some contact with BSD distributions too. He has lost some nights compiling and applying patches to the Linux kernel to make its desktop work. Since the beginning, he has been acting as a problem solver, no matter what the programming language, database, or platfor...

Table of contents

• Monitoring Docker