Proactive Ops for Container Orchestration Environments: Monitoring and Logging Strategies with Docker Enterprise

Over the last decade, the popularity of microservices and highly-scalable systems has increased, leading to an overall increase in the complexity of applications that are now distributed heavily across the network with many moving pieces and potential failure modes.

This architectural evolution has changed the monitoring requirements and led to a need for scalable and insightful tooling and practices to enable us to better identify, debug and resolve issues in our systems before they impact the business and our end users (internal and/or external).

I recently gave a talk at DockerCon SF 18 discussing functionality in Docker Enterprise that enables operators to more easily monitor their container platform environment, along with some key metrics and best practices to triage and remediate issues before they cause downtime.

You can watch the full talk here:

Monitoring Methodologies

One of the most well-known early monitoring techniques was the USE method from Brendan Gregg at Netflix. USE specified that for every resource we should be monitoring utilization (time spent servicing work), saturation (the degree to which a resource had work it couldn’t service) and errors (number of error events). This model worked well for more hardware / node centric metrics but network-based Continue reading