Monitoring the Docker Hosts

eG Enterprise offers a specialized Docker monitoring model that monitors each of the key indicators of the performance of Docker hosts - such as the images, containers etc.- and proactively alerts administrators to potential performance bottlenecks, so that administrators can resolve the issues well before end-users complain.

Figure 1 : The layer model of Docker host

Each layer of Figure 1 above is mapped to a variety of tests, each of which report a wealth of useful information related to the docker server. Using these metrics, administrators can find quick and accurate answers to the following performance queries:

  • Is the docker service installed?
  • What is the current status of the docker service?
  • How well the data space and metadata space of the docker server is utilized?
  • How many events were triggered on the containers of the docker server? Which type of event was triggered the maximum and the minimum? – is it the create events or start events or stop events or die events?
  • What is the total count of the docker images in the server? How many images are used to create the containers?
  • What is the disk space utilization of the images that are mapped to the containers?
  • How many containers are created from each image of the docker server? How many containers are actually running and how well the CPU, disk and memory resources are utilized by those containers?
  • How many containers are available in the server and among them how many containers are currently running? How many containers are added recently and how many are actually removed?
  • What is the uptime of each container?
  • Is the container available over the network?
  • What is the disk space utilization of each container?
  • How well data is transmitted and received from each container?
  • What is the rate of errors that are transmitted through each container?
  • How well the memory is utilized by each container?
  • How well data is read from and written to each container?

The first two layers of the layer model are briefly discussed in the following sections;

The Operating System, Network and TCP layers of the Docker are similar to that of a Linux server and had been dealt in extensively in Unix and Windows Servers monitoring model.