Use Google cAdvisor for monitoring your containers + Docker tutorial

If you’re looking for tool to understand the resource usage and performance characteristics of the running containers then cAdvisor (Container Advisor) is the perfect tool that provides container metrics.It is a running daemon that collects, aggregates, processes, and exports information about running containers. Specifically, for each container it keeps resource isolation parameters, historical resource usage, histograms of complete historical resource usage and network statistics. This data is exported by container and machine-wide.

This quickstart assumes basic understanding of Docker concepts, please refer earlier posts for understanding on Docker & how to install and containerize applications.

Key Features

• cAdvisor is an open-source container resource usage collector.
• Native support for Docker containers and just support other container types.
• cAdvisor operates per node. It auto-discovers all containers in the given node and collects CPU, memory, filesystem, and network usage statistics.
• Support for running standalone outside of Docker or any other container.
• Provides the overall machine usage by analyzing the ‘root’ container on the machine.
• Supports exporting stats to various storage plugins ex.Elasticsearch,InfluxDB etc.,
• Metrics can be viewed on Web-UI /containers which exports live information about all containers on the machine.
• Exposes raw and processed stats via a versioned remote REST API

Limitations

• Collects basic resource utilization i.e., we would not be able to get how the container applications are actually performing, for example, x% CPU utilization
• Doesn’t offer any long term storage, trending, or analysis capabilities.

Quick Start: Run cAdvisor with Docker Container

Docker image google/cadvisor includes everything that you need to get started

docker run \
  --volume=/:/rootfs:ro \
  --volume=/var/run:/var/run:rw \
  --volume=/sys:/sys:ro \
  --volume=/var/lib/docker/:/var/lib/docker:ro \
  --volume=/dev/disk/:/dev/disk:ro \
  --publish=8080:8080 \
  --detach=true \
  --name=cadvisor \
  google/cadvisor:latest

cAdvisor would now be running on http://localhost:8080

cAdvisor Metrics

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Additional Resources

• Runtime Options
• Prometheus Tutorial
• TOP 6 GUI tools for managing Docker environments
• Docker tutorial – Build Docker image for your Java application
• How to aggregate Docker Container logs and analyse with ELK stack ?
• Implementing secure containers using gVisor+Docker tutorial