Docker Cookbook

294 | Chapter 9: Monitoring Containers

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Figure 9-4. The cAdvisor UI
See Also
• cAdvisor API 
documentation
9.10 Using cAdvisor to Monitor Resource Usage in Containers | 295

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9.11 Monitoring Container Metrics with InfluxDB,
Grafana, and cAdvisor
Problem
You would like to use an alternative to Elastic/Logstash/Kibana for your logging and
monitoring stack.
Solution
Consider using cAdvisor (see 
Recipe 9.10
) in conjunction with 
InfluxDB
for storing
the time-series data, and 
Grafana
 for visualizing the information. cAdvisor collects
good metrics from the containers running on your Docker host, and has an InfluxDB
storage driver that enables you to store all the metrics as a time series in InfluxDB (a
distributed database for time-series data). Visualizing the data from InfluxDB can be
done with Grafana, an equivalent to Kibana.
The following is the basic setup for a single node. You would run cAdvisor, config‐
ured to send data to an InfluxDB host, and you would run InfluxDB and Grafana. All
of these come as containers:
$ docker run -d -p 8083:8083 -p 8086:8086 \
-e PRE_CREATE_DB="db" \
--name influxdb \
tutum/influxdb:0.8.8
$ docker run -d -p 80:80 \
--link=influxdb:influxdb \
-e HTTP_USER=admin \
-e HTTP_PASS=root \
-e INFLUXDB_HOST=influxdb \
-e INFLUXDB_NAME=db \
--name=grafana \
tutum/grafana
$ docker run -v /var/run:/var/run:rw \
-v /sys:/sys:ro \
-v /var/lib/docker/:/var/lib/docker:ro \
-p 8080:8080 \
--link=influxdb:influxdb \
-d --name=cadvisor \
google/cadvisor:latest \
-storage_driver=influxdb \
-storage_driver_host=influxdb:8086 \
-storage_driver_db=db
In a multiple hosts setup, you would run only cAdvisor on all your nodes. InfluxDB
would be running in a distributed manner on several hosts, and Grafana might be
behind an Nginx proxy for load-balancing. Considering the fast pace of development