Monitoring Docker and Kubernetes

In Chapter 4, Managing Containers, we discussed the docker container top and docker container stats commands. You may recall that both of these commands show real-time information only—there is no historical data that is kept.

This is great if you are trying to debug a problem as it is running or want to quickly get an idea of what is going on inside your containers; however, it is not too helpful if you need to look back at a problem. For example, you may have configured your containers to restart if they have become unresponsive. While that will help with the availability of your application, it isn't much of a help if you need to look at why your container became unresponsive.

In the GitHub repository in the /chapter14 folder, there is a folder called prometheus in which there is a Docker Compose file that launches three different containers on two networks. Rather than looking at the Docker Compose file itself, let's take...