Over the past year, you've probably read the numerous articles, blogs and press releases about Docker, so just to recap; Docker is an open platform for developer and IT operators to build, ship and run applications. It is designed to deliver applications faster and allows you to separate your applications from your infrastructure – treating infrastructure like a managed application. This allows for application speed, portability and flexibility which is key to developing applications for today’s rapidly changing economy. But what impact does Docker have on the enterprise and are they really adopting the Docker Platform?
In early 2015 StackEngine sponsored a survey to better understand Docker adoption, transaction and challenges. They found that Docker adoption is real and ahead of schedule in the enterprise with “over 70% of respondents are either using Docker or evaluating it in their organizations”. Surprisingly 31% of respondents are already using Docker in production with heavy initial Docker use in QA/Test (63%) and Dev (53%). With more and more developers adopting Docker platform, enterprise IT is faced with new challenges such as deployment and monitoring. How does the “containerization” of applications affect how you monitor an application? How will you continue to deliver optimal performance and availability of the overall service?
Monitoring applications deployed into a Docker Container with CA APM
Docker Platform provides some basic monitoring and metrics such as total number of containers, images, CPU usage, network traffic, running containers, memory usage, etc. By using the Docker Remote API, CA Application Performance Management (APM) is able to gather and report on these metrics alongside the same transaction performance metrics collected for application deployed to Docker. Yes, the same agent you use today can be used to instrument applications deployed in Docker containers. These additional Docker metrics are gathered using a Field Pack which is a free open source add-on to CA APM. It uses the CA APM EPAgent to connect to any 3rd party API and in this example uses the Docker Remote API to gather and report specific Docker metrics.
Next time a developer gives you an application Docker image and says deploy this into production you can rest easy knowing that you will have complete visibility into the performance and availability of both the application and the Docker engine.
Want to try it today, download the CA APM Field Pack for Docker from our GitHub repository. We welcome feedback or feel free to improve and share with the community.