Docker instrumentation for infrastructure monitoring

Our infrastructure agent automatically monitors your Docker containers. With Docker 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 Docker-related alert conditions.

Requirements

Requirement details for automatic Docker 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 to v23

Enable Docker container monitoring

If you meet the requirements and have installed the correct infrastructure monitoring agent, there are no additional steps to enable Docker monitoring. If Docker is running, data will automatically be reported.

You can also use a Docker image containing the infrastructure monitoring agent. For more information, see Docker container for infrastructure monitoring.

View your Docker data

To view your Docker data in the New Relic UI, use either of these options:

• Go to one.newrelic.com > Infrastructure > Hosts > Containers.

  OR

• Go to one.newrelic.com > Infrastructure > Third-party services, and select Docker-related links.

For more information, see Query your data.

Docker attributes

Docker 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 Docker 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, and image)
• CPU metrics (like cpuUsedCores, cpuPercent, and cpuThrottleTimeMs)
• Memory metrics (like memoryUsageBytes, memoryCacheBytes, and memoryResidentSizeBytes)
• Network metrics (like networkRxBytes, networkRxDropped, and networkTxBytes)

Docker 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 Docker-related alert conditions, use either of these options:

1. Go to one.newrelic.com > Alerts & AI.

   OR

   Go to one.newrelic.com > Infrastructure > Settings > Alerts.

2. Create a new alert condition.

3. For the condition type, select Container metrics.