Monintainer: An orchestration-independent extensible container-based monitoring solution for large clusters

Abstract

Container virtualization has recently gained popularity due to its low performance and resource allocation overhead. The rise of this technology can be attributed to the advancement of cloud computing and the adoption of micro-services architecture. These new approaches offer a more efficient and fine-grained system design through the benefits of containerization, such as isolation, portability, and improved performance. However, container-based systems have created new challenges in monitoring due to their automated flexibility, ephemerality, and the increasing number of containers in a system. So there is a practical need for effective monitoring and performance management tools. This paper analyses the key performance metrics for machine, container and application services, including CPU usage, memory usage, disk usage, and network usage. Furthermore, we review several widespread tools for collecting and monitoring these metrics and present the Monintainer tool. It is a solution designed to monitor entire container-based systems, from applications to their underlying infrastructure, allowing users to better understand their systems’ behavior in run-time. The tool’s results can aid container-based systems’ design, implementation and optimization.