Sometimes, setting up instrumentation such as the monitoring and logging system (like we did in Chapter 3, Monitoring Docker) might not be enough. Ideally, we should create a way to troubleshoot our Docker deployments in a scalable fashion. However, sometimes, we have no choice but to log in to the Docker host and look at the Docker containers themselves. It is important to know how to interact with our Docker hosts in order to figure out what is going on with our systems. These low-level debugging activities will also help to improve our monitoring and logging system for our Docker infrastructure.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Inspecting containers with the docker exec command
- Debugging from outside Docker
- Other container debugging tools