Container monitoring tools track container performance, collects event data, and measures the effects of container-sharing resources. Monitoring practices can be proactive, reactive, or adaptive. Proactive monitoring sets protocols to prevent container failure. Reactive monitoring alerts users by raising events when containers fail. Adaptive monitoring continually assesses container performance and impacts from new components. Companies use these tools to prevent large-scale failures and understand what caused individual events. They also help to optimize software-defined networks and resource allocation. In reality, container monitoring is essentially application performance monitoring (APM) software for container applications and their networks. They can exist independently or function alongside software types such as container management software and container networking software solutions.
To qualify for inclusion in the Container Monitoring category, a product must:
Track container application and network performance
Track resource usage
Alert users when container failure occurs
Log events for future analysis