Docker and system monitoring

A simple overview of the most important Docker host and container metrics. (cAdvisor/Prometheus)

Docker and system monitoring screenshot 1
Docker and system monitoring screenshot 2

Docker + System dashboard

Dashboard compatible with Grafana 4

System metric

This dashboard display Docker and system metric, the aim it’s to have all the metric on one dashboard. The first lines represents the system metric with gauge and text/graph (easy to visualize and minimalist).

  • Time up
  • Memory usage/swap
  • Disk usage
  • Load
  • Network
  • CPU usage
  • Disk I/O

Alerts are set on disk usage, memory usage and load usage to warn when the metric are critics.

Docker metric

The second parts of the dashboard is Docker metric, more detailed using mostly graph.

  • CPU usage per container
  • Sent network per container
  • Received network per container
  • Memory usage/swap per container
  • Remaining memory for each container (if men_limit defined in docker-compose.yml)

Server configuration

I use the docker-compose to set my monitoring: https://github.com/vegasbrianc/prometheus. My dashboard work with this configuration. Service running:

  • docker
  • prometheus
  • node-exporter
  • alertmanager
  • cadvisor
  • grafana v4

Install with docker-compose.yml

docker-compose.yml

yml
prometheus:
    image: prom/prometheus:latest
    container_name: monitoring_prometheus
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - ./data/prometheus/config:/etc/prometheus/
      - ./data/prometheus/data:/prometheus
    command:
      - '-config.file=/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml'
      - '-storage.local.path=/prometheus'
      - '-alertmanager.url=http://alertmanager:9093'
    expose:
      - 9090
    ports:
      - 9090:9090
    links:
      - cadvisor:cadvisor
      - node-exporter:node-exporter

  node-exporter:
    image: prom/node-exporter:latest
    container_name: monitoring_node_exporter
    restart: unless-stopped
    expose:
      - 9100

  cadvisor:
    image: google/cadvisor:latest
    container_name: monitoring_cadvisor
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - /:/rootfs:ro
      - /var/run:/var/run:rw
      - /sys:/sys:ro
      - /var/lib/docker/:/var/lib/docker:ro
    expose:
      - 8080
  
  grafana:
    image: grafana/grafana:latest
    container_name: monitoring_grafana
    restart: unless-stopped
    links:
      - prometheus:prometheus
    volumes:
      - ./data/grafana:/var/lib/grafana
    environment:
      - GF_SECURITY_ADMIN_PASSWORD=MYPASSWORT
      - GF_USERS_ALLOW_SIGN_UP=false
      - GF_SERVER_DOMAIN=myrul.com
      - GF_SMTP_ENABLED=true
      - GF_SMTP_HOST=smtp.gmail.com:587
      - GF_SMTP_USER=myadrress@gmail.com
      - GF_SMTP_PASSWORD=mypassword
      - GF_SMTP_FROM_ADDRESS=myaddress@gmail.com

prometheus.yml

bash
# my global config
global:
  scrape_interval:     120s # By default, scrape targets every 15 seconds.
  evaluation_interval: 120s # By default, scrape targets every 15 seconds.
  # scrape_timeout is set to the global default (10s).

  # Attach these labels to any time series or alerts when communicating with
  # external systems (federation, remote storage, Alertmanager).
  external_labels:
      monitor: 'my-project'

# Load and evaluate rules in this file every 'evaluation_interval' seconds.
rule_files:
  # - "alert.rules"
  # - "first.rules"
  # - "second.rules"

# A scrape configuration containing exactly one endpoint to scrape:
# Here it's Prometheus itself.
scrape_configs:
  # The job name is added as a label `job=<job_name>` to any timeseries scraped from this config.
  - job_name: 'prometheus'

    # Override the global default and scrape targets from this job every 5 seconds.
    scrape_interval: 120s

    # metrics_path defaults to '/metrics'
    # scheme defaults to 'http'.

    static_configs:
         - targets: ['localhost:9090','cadvisor:8080','node-exporter:9100', 'nginx-exporter:9113']

Start your docker

Run docker-compose up -d

Revisions
RevisionDescriptionCreated
Docker

Docker

by Grafana Labs
Grafana Labs solution

Easily monitor Docker with Grafana Cloud's out-of-the-box monitoring solution.

Learn more

Get this dashboard

Import the dashboard template

or

Download JSON

Datasource
Dependencies