Complete Visibility into Docker Containers with AppDynamics

Today we announced the AppDynamics Docker monitoring solution that provides an application-centric view inside and across Docker containers. Performance of distributed applications and business transactions can be tagged, traced, and monitored even as they transit multiple containers.

Before I talk more about the AppDynamics Docker monitoring solution, let me quickly review the premise of Docker and point you to a recent blog “Visualizing and tracking your microservices“ by my colleague, Jonah Kowall, that highlights Docker’s synergy with another hot technology trend— microservices.

What is Docker?

Docker is an open platform for developers and sysadmins of distributed applications that enables them to build, ship, and run any app anywhere. Docker allows applications to run on any platform irrespective of what tools were used to build it making it easy to distribute, test, and run software. I found this 5 Minute Docker video, which is very helpful when you want to get a quick and digestible overview. If you want to learn more, you can go to Docker’s web page and start with this Docker introduction video.

Docker makes it very easy to make changes and package the software quickly for others to test without requiring a lot of resources. At AppDynamics, we embraced Docker completely in our development, testing, and demo environments. For example, as you can see in the attached screenshot from our demo environment, we are using Docker to provision various demo use cases with different application environments like jBoss, Tomcat, MongoDB, Angularjs, and so on.

In addition, you can test drive AppDynamics by downloading, deploying, and testing with the packaged applications from the AppDynamics Docker repos.

Complete visibility into Docker environment with AppDynamics

AppDynamics provides visibility into applications and business transactions made out of multiple smaller decoupled (micro) services deployed in a Docker environment using the Docker monitoring solution. The AppDynamics Docker Monitoring Extension monitors and reports on various metrics, such as: total number of containers, running containers, images, CPU usage, memory usage, network traffic, etc. The AppDynamics Docker monitoring extension gathers metrics from the Docker Remote API, either using Unix Socket or TCP giving you the choice for data collection protocol.

The Docker metrics can now be correlated with the metrics from the applications running in the container. For example, in the screenshot below, you can see the overall performance (calls per minute in red) of a web server deployed in Docker container is correlated with Docker performance metrics (Network transmit/receive and CPU usage). As the number of calls per minute to the web server increases, you can see that the network traffic and CPU usage increases as well.

Customers can leverage all the core functionalities of AppDynamics (e.g. dynamic baselining, health rules, policies, actions, etc.) for all the Docker metrics while correlating them with the metrics already running in the Docker environment.

The Docker monitoring extension also creates an out of the box custom dashboard with key Docker metrics as shown in the screenshot below. This out of the box dashboard will jump start the monitoring of Docker environment.

Download the AppDynamics Docker monitoring extension, set-up and configure it following the instructions on the extension page and get end-to-end visibility into your Docker environment and the applications running within them.

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