cAdvisor: How to run it with a remote docker API? - docker

Is there a way to run a cAdvisor container in a Monitoring server and monitor docker containers in a separate server? Is there a command I can include when running cAdvisor?
Because I want to be able to monitor containers in a separate server but I’m not sure how to achieve that…
Any suggestions or shared knowledge would be very helpful. Thank you.

To take measurements from different machines, you will have to deploy cAdvisor to every separate server.
My source is:
A monitoring solution for Docker hosts, containers and containerized services
Extending the monitoring system
Dockprom Grafana dashboards can be easily extended to cover more then one Docker host. In order to monitor more hosts, all you need to do is to deploy a node-exporter and a cAdvisor container on each host and point the Prometheus server to scrape those.
On how to create and start a container by using the remote api, you can check this answer: How to use docker remote api to create container?

Related

Docker desktop networking Windows and Linux nodes

I have a windows service within a Docker container that needs to access a MySQL database in a Linux container on the same machine (dev machine currently).
I thought of creating an overlay network on the two "nodes" on the same machine but this isn't possible as creating the swarm worker fails on windows after creating the swarm master on linux.
Is this possible, if not what is the easiest way of doing this? The purpose of the windows container is simply to deploy to a test environment to gather data. Do I need to deploy the linux to the cloud or another machine maybe, so the windows container can communicate?
You can simply use docker compose, it will create the network automatically. Replace the MySQL host with the MySQL service name you defined in the compose yaml file. Detailed information please refer to docker-compose.

Using cAdvisor to monitor docker containers

I am planning to use cAdvisor to monitor performance of running docker container on multiple VMs, do I need to install cAdvisor on all VMs, or there is any other way?
Yes, you need it on each host seeing as it uses the local mounts to get the data it exports

Can all docker swarm instances run on same machine?

I have a couple of Docker swarm questions (Sorry for not splitting them up but they are all closely related):
Do all instances in a swarm have to run on different machines or can they all run on the same? (if having limited amount of hardware and just wanting to try swarm mode)
Do I have to run swarm mode to be able to communicate between instances?
What is the key difference between swarm mode and just running a number of containers as regular?
What are the options of communication between instances of containers? (in swarm and in regular mode) http? named pipes? other?
If using http communication between containers on same machine, will it be roughly similarly as fast as named pipes?
Is there any built in support for a message bus or similar in Docker?
Is there support for any consensus protocol in Docker?
Are there any GUI's for designing, managing, testing and/or debugging Docker swarms?
Can a container list other containers, stop/restart some and start new ones? (to be able to function as a manager for other containers)
Can a container be given access to OS-features (Linux in my case) to configure for instance a reverse proxy or port forwarding on the WAN?
Background: What I'm trying to figure out is how I should go about and build a micro service mesh using Docker. The containers will be running .NET Core. I'm not too keen on relying too much on specifically Docker since it may not be the preferred tech in a couple of years. What can/should I do with Docker and what can/should I do inside the containers. That's what I'm trying to figure out.
I've copied your questions and tried to answer them.
Do all instances in a swarm have to run on different machines or can they all run on the same? (if having limited amount of hardware and just wanting to try swarm mode)
You can have only one machine in a swarm and run multiple tasks of the same service or in other words your scale of a service can be more than the number of actual machines. I have a testing swarm with a single machine and one with three and it works the same way.
Do I have to run swarm mode to be able to communicate between instances?
You have to run your docker in swarm mode in order to create a service, please see this link
What is the key difference between swarm mode and just running a number of containers as regular?
The key difference afaik is, that when a task goes down, docker puts another task up automatically. And you can easily scale your services, which means you can easily have multiple tasks just by scaling your service (up or down). As of running a container - when it goes down you have to manually start another.
What are the options of communication between instances of containers? (in swarm and in regular mode) http? named pipes? other?
I've currently only tested with a couple of wildfly servers in a swarm, which are on the same network. I'm not sure about others, but would love to find out. I've only read about RabbitMQ, but can't seem to find the link atm.
If using http communication between containers on same machine, will it be roughly similarly as fast as named pipes?
I can't say.
Is there any built in support for a message bus or similar in Docker?
I can't say.
Are there any GUI's for designing, managing, testing and/or debugging Docker swarms?
I've tested rancher and portainer.io, for a list of them I found this link
Can a container list other containers, stop/restart some and start new ones?
I'm not sure why would you want to do that? And I guess it's possible, see this link
Can a container be given access to OS-features (Linux in my case) to configure for instance a reverse proxy or port forwarding on the WAN?
I can't say.
#namokarm did a great job, and I'm filling in the gaps:
Benefits of Swarm over docker run or docker-compose.
All communications between containers has to be TCP/UDP etc. You could force two containers to only run on a single machine, then bind-mount their socket so they skip the network, but that would be a bit of an anti-pattern. Swarm is designed for everything to be distributed and TCP/UDP.
In a few cases, such as PHP-FPM + Nginx, I recommend bundling both in the same container (against docker best practices, but trust me it's easier than separate containers). This will ensure they scale together (1-to-1 relationship) and stay fast since they use local sockets to communicate). I only recommend this for a few setups like this, the other being ColdFusion + Nginx because they are two parts of the same tool that provide a HTTP response... I don't recommend bundling images together in nearly all other cases, but I'm open to ideas :).
Rancher is no longer supporting Swarm. Portainer and SwarmPit are GUI options.
Yes a container running something like Portainer/SwarmPit or controlling the Docker socket through a bind-mount or TCP can control the whole Swarm. This is how all docker management works :)
For reverse proxy, you would run a container-based proxy like Traefik or Docker Flow Proxy, which sets up HAProxy for Docker and Swarm.
Many of these topics are discussed in my DockerCon talks: https://www.bretfisher.com/dockercon18/

What is the Docker Engine?

When people talk about the 'Docker Engine' do they mean both the Client and the Daemon? Or is it something else entirely?
As I see it there is a Docker Client, a Docker Daemon. The Client runs locally and connects to the Daemon which does the actual running of the containers. The Client can connect to a remote Daemon. Are these both together the Engine? thanks
The Docker Engine is the Docker Daemon running on a single host, installed with the Docker Client CLI. Here are the docs that answer this specific question.
On top of that, you can have a Swarm running that joins multiple hosts to horizontally scale and provide fault tolerance. And there are numerous other projects from Docker, like their Registry, Docker Cloud, and Universal Control Plane, that are each separate from the engine.
Docker engine is a client-server application which comprises of 3 components.
1. Client: Docker CLI or the command line window that helps us to interact.
2. REST API: Client communicate with the server with REST API, the commands issued by the client is sent to the server in the form of REST API, it is this reason our server can either be in the local or remote machine.
3. Server: Server here is either the local or remote machine or host machine which has a daemon process running in it which receives the commands and creates, manages and destroys the docker objects like images, containers, volumes etc.

Platform to test with docker containers in developer environment

We are currently moving towards microservices with Docker from a monolith application running in JBoss. I want to know the platform/tools/frameworks to be used to test these Docker containers in developer environment. Also what tools should be used to deploy these containers to this developer test environment.
Is it a good option to use some thing like Kubernetes with chef/puppet/vagrant?
I think so. Make sure to get service discovery, logging and virtual networking right. For the former you can check out skydns. Docker now has a few logging plugins you can use for log management. For virtual networking you can look for Flannel and Weave.
You want service discovery because Kubernetes will schedule the containers the way it sees fit and you need some way of telling what IP/port your microservice will be at. Virtual networking make it so each container has it's own subnet thus preventing port clashes in case you have two containers with the same ports exposed in the same host (kubernetes won't let it clash, it will schedule containers to run until you have hosts with ports available, if you try to create more it just won't run).
Also, you can try the built-in cluster tools in Docker itself, like docker service, docker network commands and Docker Swarm.
Docker-machine helps in case you already have a VM infrastructure in place.
We have created and open-sourced a platform to develop and deploy docker based microservices.
It supports service discovery, clustering, load balancing, health checks, configuration management, diagnosing and mini-DNS.
We are using it in our local development environment and production environment on AWS. We have a Vagrant box with everything prepared so you can give it a try:
http://armada.sh
https://github.com/armadaplatform/armada

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