Summary

So, how does this traditional approach to monitoring fit into a container's lifecycle?

Going back to the Pets versus Cattle analogy, at first glance, Zabbix seems to be geared more towards Pets: its feature set is best suited to monitoring services that are static over a long period of time. This means that the same approach to monitoring a pet can also be applied to long-running processes running within your containers.

Zabbix is also the perfect option for monitoring mixed environments. Maybe you have several database servers that are not running as containers, but you have several hosts running Docker, and have equipment such as switches and SANs that you need to monitor. Zabbix can provide you with a single pane of glass showing you metrics for all your environments, along with being able to alert you to problems.

So far, we have looked at using APIs and metrics provided by Docker and LXC, but what about other metrics can we use? In the next chapter, we will look at a tool that...