CMonitor: A Monitoring and Alarming Platform for Container-Based Clouds

Container technology has been recently recognized by the industry like Google and Alibaba as an emerging platform for building and deploying applications. Due to the high flexibility and low cost, more and more applications are beginning to use containers as the underlying resource abstraction platforms. In order to maintain the stability of the system and detect suspected abnormal events or operations, it is necessary to provide a monitoring and alarming mechanism for containers. In this paper, we design and implement a monitoring and alarming platform - CMonitor for the container-based clouds. It is built upon the interfaces provided by Docker containers. Specially, we added some new functions: (i) Integrated monitoring services. CMonitor not only monitors the basic resource usages of each container but also provides hardware-level and application-level monitoring services. (ii) Global topology view. CMonitor generates a global topology structure for containers by parsing network traffic among containers. (iii) Intelligent alarming mechanism. CMonitor contains several anomaly detection algorithms to identify abnormal behaviors in containers and then notifies an alarm to the users. (iv) Rich visualization functions. CMonitor records the runtime log for both system resources and application performance and generates tables and figures with advanced data visualization techniques. By using CMonitor, users can better understand the system runtime status and monitor potential abnormal events, making container-based clouds more stable, efficient and safe.