Google cAdvisor (Container Asvisor)

cAdvisor is an amazing tool. It is an all-in-one tool for grabbing real-time metrics from all the containers running on a single host and exposing these metrics. The cAdvisor collects, aggregates, processes, and exports usage and performance information from running containers.

In this section we will deploy a cAdvisor container and walk through the UI, configurations, and take a look at the metrics which it exposes.

Tasks:

• Task 1: Deploy cAdvisor
• Task 2: Tour the cAdvisor UI and configurations
• Task 3: cAdvisor Exposed Metrics
• Recap topics covered in this section

Task 1: Deploy cAdvisor

Let’s get started with deploying cAdvisor. First, we will review the cAdvisor GitHub Repos. The repo contains a wealth of documentation from using the UI to configurations. Take some time and dive into the different aspects of cAdvisor.

We recommend using Play-with-Docker for this exercise to alleviate any permissions issues or Windows issues with having to run sudo.

1. Navigate to cAdvisor GitHub Repo

2. Deploy cAdvisor:

   PWD USERS

    sudo docker service create \
    --publish published=8081,target=8080 \
    --detach=true \
    --name=cadvisor \
    google/cadvisor:latest
   

   Since we are using PWD we cannot don’t have permissions to bind mount root directories. For normal deployments please review the cAdvisor documentation

   Docker for Desktop

    sudo docker run \
    --volume=/:/rootfs:ro \
    --volume=/var/run:/var/run:ro \
    --volume=/sys:/sys:ro \
    --volume=/var/lib/docker/:/var/lib/docker:ro \
    --volume=/dev/disk/:/dev/disk:ro \
    --publish=8080:8080 \
    --detach=true \
    --name=cadvisor \
    google/cadvisor:latest
   

Task 2: Tour the cAdvisor UI and configurations

1. Once the cAdvisor is running open the UCP -> Swarm -> Services -> cAdvisor link 8081 which is located at the top of the screen

Have a look at the cAdvisor UI. What we see here is a host performance view. Scroll through the various screens to view Reservations, CPU, Memory, Network, and Storage.

1. Scroll to the top of the screen and click Docker Containers

Here we see all the Compose Demo Stack containers. Choose one of the containers and view the specific resource consumption of just that particular container.

Task 3: cAdvisor Exposed Metrics

Now, we will have a look to see how cAdvisor exposes the metrics it is gathering from running containers. As default, cAdvisor exposes metrics in the Prometheus format

Cleanup

  docker stack rm vote

  docker rm -f cadvisor

Recap

What did we learn in this section?

• Google’s Container advisor cAdvisor
• Deploy cAdvisor UI and configurations
• cAdvisor exposed metrics

Next Steps, Docker Networking

For the next step in the tutorial, head over to Prometheus