How to monitor any application running in your Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift and Mesos environments using Sysdig
I am sure you are already familiar with the power of Sysdig Cloud to automatically discover and start monitoring any application running in your Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift and Mesos environments. Earlier this month Sysdig launched the Application Checks functionality that allows Sysdig Cloud to gather even more information from your microservices infrastructure. Application Checks are a set of pre-installed plugins that poll applications for custom metrics, which are exported via the application’s status or management pages. Application like Nginx, Redis, MongoDB, and Memcached are just some of the most popular ones. To learn more and get the list of the supported applications click here.
To collect these metrics, Sysdig uses the application default connection settings. If some applications are using non-default configuration settings you can provide this information to Sysdig by editing the agent configuration file and executing a restart of the agent. This solution works well for small and static deployments, certainly in dev and test, but not at production scale. At scale new containers with custom settings are brought up constantly, multiple teams share the same infrastructure and even a brief monitoring downtime due to an agent restart is not an option.
With the introduction of per-container Application Checks, teams and individual developers can customize their applications connection settings and let Sysdig know by simply providing this information in an environment variable, either via Dockerfile or at runtime:
Dockerfile:
Runtime:
The example shows a good use case for per container Application Checks by assigning a custom password to a service like Redis. But in general, this feature allows a truly self-service Sysdig instrumentation of any application by any developer or devops engineer without having to contact the Sysdig Cloud administrator. For more information on this new functionality in Sysdig Cloud take a look at Sysdig Cloud user guide
“TL:DR”
Or if you are like me and you prefer to watch a video instead of reading, here is a quick video tutorial of this feature in action:
Getting Sysdig to monitor your Docker containers running on your orchestration platform of choice (Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, Mesos, Amazon ECS, CoreOS, and Google Container Engine) is painless and can be done in just few minutes. Sign up here to get Sysdig-as-a-service (no credit card required) or use our Sysdig open-source version here.
