Available software

The software should be able to tell us what containers are running, provide a live view of the resources consumed within the containers, and give statistical analysis.

The first set of software that addressed this opportunity were the server monitoring frameworks that added on a Docker monitoring plugin. The Scout server monitoring framework repurposed its LXC monitoring solution to Docker containers. This was the approach adopted by open source equivalents like Zabbix and Icinga as well.

Commercial offerings that showed up included DataDog, a monitoring service that added Docker monitoring capability to its myriad enterprise monitoring and visualisation features.

Agent-driven open source general-purpose monitoring frameworks like ‘host sFlow’ released support for Docker containers, exporting standard sFlow performance metrics for LXC containers and unifying it as part of the sFlow ecosystem that encompasses applications, virtual servers, virtual networks, servers and networks.