The Essentials of Container Monitoring

The trend speaks volumes. By 2020, more than 50% of global enterprises will be running containerized applications in production, up from less than 20% today, according to Gartner¹. And IDC says that by 2021, more than 95% of new microservices will be deployed in containers².

At the same time, containerized application environments have created exponential complexity in cloud-based application management and monitoring. Among the challenges:

• Increases in components, dependencies and communication flows that necessitate the need for automatic mapping and maintaining telemetry data when containers move. 
• Microservice and container proliferation that mean intelligent visualization and analytics are needed to surface KPIs as well as avert alert storms.
• Microservice performance impacted by application metrics and individual container attributes that must be tracked by correlating across hosts, containers and applications. 
• Dynamic changes to containers that require DevOps teams to have more reliable ways to determine what, when and how application performance is impacted.

Not easy tasks on their own – and why container monitoring has become an essential APM tool for DevOps to rapidly develop and deploy innovative, cloud-based applications by incorporating new approaches in metric capture, correlation, analytics, transaction tracing, and visualization.

Yes, it’s complex. And yes, there is much to consider. Start here for a quick overview of the essentials of container monitoring. Then, come back often to get the latest updates on the issues, trends, and events affecting containerization today.
 

¹Source: Gartner Market Guide for Container Management Software, #G00321084, August 10, 2017
²Source: IDC Predictions Provide a Blueprint and Key Building Blocks for Becoming a Digital Native Enterprise, #US43171317, October 2017