Monitoring microservices and containers

Why microservices and container-based applications should have more in-depth monitoring requirements 

Over the last decade microservices and containers have emerged as the preferred developer choice for building application architectures. While the challenges associated with monitoring these environments is unique, it’s important to understand the difference in traditional monitoring and monitoring for microservices and containers.

Microservices and container-based applications have different and more intensive monitoring requirements. Failure is the most obvious reason why monitoring is important but it’s not the only requirement.

System performance is not just up or down. Complex systems can operate in a degraded state that could impact performance in different ways. Monitoring the behavior of systems can alert operators well before total failures can occur. 

Given the importance of monitoring microservices and containers, application performance monitoring (APM) should be an important part of IT operations. This is why ITRS has become the preferred solution for large enterprise companies.    

CIOs are making microservices and containers more resilient 

Microservices and containers represent an important part in architectural development and innovation. It can help IT organisations provide new and improved services for DevOps teams saving time, simplifying coordination and improving processes.

With the growth of cloud services and mobile applications, microservices and containers has become an important strategic tool in enabling developers to break away from traditional development. When using containers, microservices won’t take down whole areas of unrelated functionality if they fail.

Microservices can be developed so they can immediately redistribute workloads and almost instantaneously bring up new runtimes which have cost-effective access to enormous infrastructure resources.

Productivity, scalability and resiliency are all improved by incorporating, properly managing and monitoring microservices and containers. 

Microservices + containers + monitoring = successful DevOps 

Microservices and containers offer a new way to deliver and manage enterprise applications, but they also require a different approach for how DevOps monitor their systems and the data that gives them overall system health. 

Although there is a growing interest and rapid adaption of microservices and containers, running them in production requires a steep learning curve. Improved monitoring of microservices and containers makes for robust performance and greater end-user satisfaction. 

Gartner predicts that by 2022, more than 75% of global organisations will be running containerised applications in production, which is a significant increase from fewer than 30% today. Gartner’s Monitoring Modern Services and Containers defines requirements for monitoring as: 

“Infrastructure and application service monitoring requires data collection, storage, and analysis across potentially three domains: metrics, logs and traces. In addition, an alerting mechanism that crosses all three domains must support alter prioritisation and multiple vehicles for notification to manage fatigue.”  

The environment needs reactive, proactive and forensics monitoring. The monitoring component provides runtime visibility at the cluster node, container and microservices level. Both container runtime and kernel-level host monitoring should be available. 

At ITRS, we provide solutions that can help improve the overall system health while improving the monitoring of microservices and containers.