Summary

In this chapter, we took a long look at metrics and monitoring our container applications and services. We started with a discussion on why you need to have a clear strategy on your metric monitoring and why you need to make a lot of decisions before your project even starts development. We then introduced Prometheus and gave an overview of its history, how it works, and why it has grown in popularity over a very short period. It was then time to get back working again and we installed Prometheus onto our system, became familiar with using the web interface, started to gather metrics from Docker (with some minor changes), and by using cAdvisor, collected metrics on the running containers.

The query language used by Prometheus can sometimes be a little confusing, so we took some time to explore PromQL before looking at using exporters to collect even more metrics. We finished up this chapter by integrating Grafana into our environment, displaying our times-series data from...