If you use containers as part of your day-to-day operations, you need to monitor them — ideally, by using a monitoring solution that you already have in place, rather than implementing an entirely new tool. Containers are often deployed quickly and at a high volume, and they frequently consume and release system resources at a rapid rate. You need to have some way of measuring container performance, and the impact that container deployment has on your system.
In this article, we’ll take a look at four widely used monitoring platforms – Netuitive, New Relic, Splunk, and AppDynamics – that support containers, and compare how they measure up when it comes to monitoring containers.
First, though, a question: When you monitor containers, what kind of metrics do you expect to see? The answer, as we’ll see below, varies with the monitoring platform. But in general, container metrics fall into two categories—those that measure overall container impact on the system, and those that focus on the performance of individual containers.
Setting up the Monitoring System
The first step in any kind of software monitoring, of course, is to install the monitoring service. For all of the platforms covered in this article, you can expect additional steps for setting up standard monitoring features. Here we cover only those directly related to container monitoring. Continue reading…
