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Docker Container Monitoring with Prometheus

Prometheus has exporters that are capable of easily exposing metrics for a variety of systems and infrastructures. Docker containers are a great way to manage your applications, and they can be monitored by Prometheus using cAdvisor. In this lab, you will have the opportunity to use cAdvisor to set up Prometheus monitoring for containers running on a Docker host.

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Path Info

Level

Intermediate

Duration

45m

Published

Jun 12, 2020

Challenge

Set Up cAdvisor to Expose Metrics

Run cAdvisor in a container:

docker run -d --restart always --name cadvisor -p 8080:8080 -v "/:/rootfs:ro" -v "/var/run:/var/run:rw" -v "/sys:/sys:ro" -v "/var/lib/docker/:/var/lib/docker:ro" google/cadvisor:latest

Verify you can query cAdvisor for metrics:
```
curl localhost:8080/metrics
```

Challenge

Configure Prometheus to Scrape Docker Container Metrics from cAdvisor
1. Log in to the Prometheus server.
2. Edit the Prometheus config:
```
sudo vi /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml
```
3. Under the scrape_configs section, add a scrape configuration for cAdvisor:
```
- job_name: 'Docker Containers'
  static_configs:
  - targets: ['limedrop-docker:8080']
```
4. Restart Prometheus to load the new configuration:
```
sudo systemctl restart prometheus
```
5. Use the expression browser to verify you can see Docker container metrics in Prometheus. You can access the expression browser in a web browser at http://<PROMETHEUS_SERVER_PUBLIC_IP>:9090:
6. Run a query to view some Docker container metric data:
```
container_memory_usage_bytes{name=~"web."}
```

Author

Pluralsight Skills

Pluralsight Skills gives leaders confidence they have the skills needed to execute technology strategy. Technology teams can benchmark expertise across roles, speed up release cycles and build reliable, secure products. By leveraging our expert content, skill assessments and one-of-a-kind analytics, keep up with the pace of change, put the right people on the right projects and boost productivity. It's the most effective path to developing tech skills at scale.

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Follow along with the author’s guided walkthrough and build something new in your provided environment!

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