By: Lora Johnson
Enterprises requiring more dynamic and resilient environments to support modern applications and microservices often turn to container technologies like Docker for its agility and flexibility. The ease with which teams — development, automation and DevOps — can leverage container technologies makes it difficult to gain enterprise-level visibility into infrastructure resource use and consumption, especially in siloed organizations. Enterprise administrators are challenged to support volatile new technologies, like Docker, yet maintain consistent service levels across the entire environment.
With the new Docker Management Pack from Blue Medora for vRealize Operations, you can garner control across the data center and bring intelligence over container instances and architecture, all while supporting the need for DevOps to innovate and deploy services quickly.
Available today, the Docker Management Pack from Blue Medora boasts technology to drive better visibility, and thus performance and control, including:
- More than 80 collected metrics displayed in three comprehensive dashboards, including overview, health investigation and container details
- Capacity planning to make sure the right resources are available to Docker deployments
- Relationships from Docker to VMware and beyond to ascertain infrastructure bottlenecks and resource contention
In this blog post, I’ll highlight three key resources that you can leverage to drive better performance across your Docker environment — right from vRealize Operations.
Container Performance
The core of the Docker Management Pack from Blue Medora offers access to more metrics, dashboards and reports so you have better visibility into performance across your Docker environment. The management pack adds more than 80 metrics, including container service/container CPU usage, memory usage, network throughput and filesystem disk usage.
Figure 1: Overview Dashboard in the Docker Management Pack from Blue Medora
In addition to more visibility into key performance indicators, the management pack boasts more out-of-the-box dashboards and reports — like overview, health investigation and container details. Within each of the dashboards and reports, you can dive deeper into key elements to pinpoint problems as they arise.
Complemented by other key functionality like relationship mapping and capacity planning, you can truly understand how your Docker containers are performing — offering essential visibility into what often serves as a black box for enterprise organizations.
Relationship Mapping
Having visibility into how your Docker environment performs is great, but what becomes even more important, is the ability to understand how that environment interacts with your virtualization, host and datacenter resources. It’s no secret that an unmonitored environment inevitably hogs resources — and can have a negative impact on performance across your IT stack.
With the Blue Medora Docker Management Pack for vRealize Operations, extend visibility into key relationships, including:
- VMware virtual machines
- Nutanix
- KVM
In doing so, you can dig deeper into key metrics pertaining to key relationships between Docker and these three solutions. Pinpoint problems to understand if they are occurring within your Docker environment, or if an issue with your virtualization layer may be causing the issue.
Capacity Planning
Understand your resource availability — both today and the future — can ensure that you have what you need to successfully deploy Docker containers. Because Docker containers can live in your environment for days or years, it can be challenging to understand what your capacity needs are.
Figure 2: Example of an analysis badge in the Docker Management Pack for vRealize Operations
The Blue Medora Docker Management Pack for vRealize Operations extends capacity definitions to include key elements like CPU, memory and space for Docker container resources. Leverage analysis badges and vROps predictive analytics engine to clearly understand how these resources are being used, and where you may need to add additional capacity for your Docker environment.
Learn more about the Blue Medora Docker Management Pack for vRealize Operations on Blue Medora’s website or VMware Solution Exchange.
