GroundWork, Inc.,
the leading dynamic monitoring solution for IT operations management
and hybrid cloud monitoring, releases GroundWork BoxSpy, designed
specifically to monitor Docker and other Linux container environments.
GroundWork BoxSpy is the most resource-efficient, comprehensive
monitoring system available for today's container technologies.
"Docker
and containers represent a newer, often better way for developers,
lines of business and organisations to develop and package
applications, but for enterprise IT teams there are still significant
gaps in terms of security and other concerns compared to traditional
VMs," says Jay Lyman, Research Manager for 451 Research. "One of the
areas that is lacking for Docker and containers is monitoring, where
BoxSpy can help provide the capabilities required for enterprise
deployment."
Benefits of monitoring Docker containers with GroundWork BoxSpy: - Works ‘out-of-the-box' with GroundWork, but also has a REST API that makes it compatible with other monitoring technologies
- Lives in a container and is capable of monitoring other containers running on the same system
- Designed for both DevOps and production environments
- Adds
full-featured enterprise monitoring to Docker environments with the
ability to correlate Docker performance with the rest of the IT
environment
- Designed for dynamic environments -- automatically monitors new Docker containers as you spin them up
"Dynamic
environments, like those based on Linux containers, tend to break IT
monitoring or at best render them cumbersome and complicated. You can't
be very dynamic if your management tools can't keep up with the speed
of change," said David Dennis, VP of Marketing and Products for
GroundWork. "Also, running Linux containers in production requires the
ability to see container performance data next to performance data from
the rest of the infrastructure - the compute, network and storage
components. If you can't do that, you can't optimize your application
scale out. We're happy to have worked with Docker personnel to make
BoxSpy solve both problems."
BoxSpy is based on Google's cAdvisor container monitoring technology and improves it by:
- Dramatically reducing the resource demand and performance impact
- API clean-up and bug-fixing
- Removing unnecessary overhead that isn't needed when talking to an external monitoring system
- Normalising metrics to make them more human readable and standardised
- Adding threshold setting
- Adding process monitoring
BoxSpy is available, either as an installable binary or source for local compilation, at: github.com/gwos/boxspy