Our infrastructure agent automatically monitors your containers. With container monitoring you can:
- Group containers by tags, attributes, and other metadata.
- Search for containers relevant to your monitoring scenario.
- Link to related entities that may be affected by issues with the container.
- Set container-related alert conditions.
Requirements
Requirement details for automatic container monitoring for New Relic's infrastructure agent:
- A New Relic account. Don't have one? Sign up for free!. No credit card required.
- Infrastructure agent 1.8.32 or higher running on Linux
- If using CentOS, you must have CentOS version 6.0 or higher
- Docker with engine from v1.12 or other
containerd
-based container runtimes.
Important
Support for Operating systems using Control Group v2 is included from infrastructure agent v.1.26.0 and nri-docker v1.7.0.
Enable container monitoring
If you meet the requirements and have installed the correct infrastructure agent, there are no additional steps to enable container monitoring. If a container runtime is running, data will automatically be reported.
You can also use a container image containing the infrastructure agent. For more information, see Container for infrastructure monitoring.
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View your container data
To view your container data in the New Relic UI, use either of these options:
Go to one.newrelic.com > All capabilities > Infrastructure > Hosts > Containers.
OR
Go to one.newrelic.com > All capabilities > Infrastructure > Third-party services, and select Docker-related links.
For more information, see Query your data.
container attributes
Container attributes (metrics and metadata) are attached to the ContainerSample
event. Here's an example of a query to find out how many containers are associated with each container image:
SELECT uniqueCount(containerId) FROM ContainerSample FACET imageName SINCE 1 HOUR AGO TIMESERIES
To see all ContainerSample
attributes, use our data dictionary. Attributes include:
- General metadata (like
containerId
,name
, andimage
) - CPU metrics (like
cpuUsedCores
,cpuPercent
, andcpuThrottleTimeMs
) - Memory metrics (like
memoryUsageBytes
,memoryCacheBytes
, andmemoryResidentSizeBytes
) - Network metrics (like
networkRxBytes
,networkRxDropped
, andnetworkTxBytes
)
Container metrics are also attached to the ProcessSample
event.
The reported data does not include information related to the container orchestrator (for example, ECS or Kubernetes). To monitor those, you can add the orchestrator's cluster and task names as labels.
Set alert conditions
To create container-related alert conditions, use either of these options:
Go to one.newrelic.com > All capabilities > Alerts .
OR
Go to one.newrelic.com > All capabilities > Infrastructure > Settings > Alerts.
Create a new alert condition.
For the condition type, select Container metrics.
Enable container metrics collection from Docker API
The nri-docker integration, by default, employs the Docker API in conjunction with the /proc filesystem to extract container metrics. As of version v1.51.0 of the infrastructure agent, you can reconfigure the integration to solely source metrics from the Docker API.
This Docker API-only collection strategy applies only when the Docker Engine Cgroup operates under version V2. To enforce the Docker API-only collection, adapt the docker-config.yml configuration file located in the integrations.d directory to resemble the following:
integrations: - name: nri-docker env: USE_DOCKER_API: true when: feature: docker_enabled file_exists: /var/run/docker.sock interval: 15s
Tip
Metrics variations between metrics sources are detailed in the ContainerSample
attributes.
Disabling container monitoring
To disable this capability simply delete the docker-config.yml
configuration file from the integrations.d
folder.