Monitoring

Monitoring Sitecore Container environment Host OS and Docker

Neil KillenLeave a comment

In part 1 of this series, I introduced Prometheus and lay some foundations for monitoring a Sitecore container environment using Prometheus. In this post, I will show you how to collect and monitor the Host OS and container metrics exposed by Docker.

Why should we care about Docker the Host OS Metrics?

To monitor your containerized Sitecore application effectively you need to understand the health of the underlying system your containers are running on. To achieve this, you have to monitor the system metrics like CPU, memory, network, and disk also docker is starting and stopping containers so you need to know the state of your docker resource.

How to collect Docker performance metrics

Docker supports Prometheus OOTB and provides performance metrics you can collect and monitor, however it is disabled by default.

1. Enabling Docker Metrics.

First things first lets enable the metrics. Open the daemon.json file and add the metrics-address setting:

“metrics-addr” : “127:0:0:1:9323”

Apply and restart docker. Now you should be able browse to the docker metrics 127.0.0.1:9323/metrics and verify metrics are exposed.

DockerMetrics

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Monitoring Sitecore Containers

Neil Killen1 Comment

The ability to monitor your Sitecore instances is essential. Knowing your application is available and performing in production as expected is critical. To be proactive and respond to changes in performance as opposed to reactive after an incident has occurred, you need a continuous overview of the state of the application and the underlying infrastructure. This involves gathering metrics like CPU, memory usage, and storage consumption as well as any application-related metrics. However, when monitoring a containerized Sitecore instance we cannot apply our usual methods and tools to provide us with all the data we need. In this post, I will show you some of the native tools to help you monitor Sitecore containers.

Docker stats

The docker stats command display a live stream (updated every second) of running containers resource usage statistics docker stats:

dockerstats

  • CPU % – the percentage of the host’s CPU the container is using.
  • PRIV WORKING SET – refers to the total physical memory (RAM) used by the process.
  • NET I/O – the amount of data the container has sent and received over its network interface.
  • BLOCK I/O – the amount of data the container has read to and written from block devices on the host.

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