Docker Cookbook

9.8 Using Elasticsearch and Kibana to Store and Visualize Container Logs | 287

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Figure 9-1. Snapshot of a Kibana dashboard obtained with this recipe
Discussion
In the solution, Elasticsearch is running on a single container. The index created
when storing your logs streamed by Logspout will not persist if you kill and remove
the Elasticsearch container. Consider mounting a volume and backing it up to persist
your Elasticsearch data. In addition, if you need more storage and an efficient index,
you should create an Elasticsearch cluster across multiple Docker hosts.
9.9 Using Collectd to Visualize Container Metrics
Problem
In addition to visualizing application logs (see 
Recipe 9.8
), you would like to monitor
container metrics such as CPU.
Solution
Use 
Collectd
. Run it in a container on all hosts where you have running containers
that you want to monitor. By mounting the 
/var/run/docker.sock
socket in a 
collectd
container, you can use a Collectd plug-in that uses the Docker stats API (see 
Recipe
9.2
) and sends metrics to a Graphite dashboard running in a different host.
This is an advanced recipe that uses several concepts covered ear‐
lier. Make sure to do 
Recipe 7.1
 and 
Recipe 9.8
 before doing this
recipe.
To test this, you’ll use the following setup, with two Docker hosts. One runs four con‐
tainers: an Nginx container used to generate dummy logs to 
stdout
, a Logspout con‐
tainer that will route all 
stdout
logs to a Logstash instance, one that generates a syn‐
thetic load (i.e., 
borja/unixbench
), and one Collectd container. These four containers
can be started using Docker Compose.