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Container monitoring is the tracking of processes and systems that continuously collect the activities and metrics of containerized applications. The gathered data can be used to monitor the containers’ performance and health in real-time or for later analysis.
The type and frequency of the metrics tracked vary depending on the application container itself, how many there are in the network, and the purposes of the data.
See below to learn all about the global container monitoring market:
Container Monitoring Market
The global container monitoring market was estimated to be valued at $289.9 million in 2020. Forecast to maintain a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 30.1% over the analysis period from 2020 to 2027, it’s expected to reach $1.8 billion by the end of it.
The solutions segment is estimated to reach a value of $651.6 million by 2027, following a CAGR of 26.8% over the same analysis period. The services segment of container monitoring is forecast to for a CAGR of 32.3%.
Regionally, the container monitoring market is segmented as follows:
- The U.S. market was estimated at $87 million in 2020, with a 26.9% share
- The Chinese market is forecast for a CAGR of 29.4%, reaching $316.4 million by 2027
- Japan and Canada are forecast to grow at a CAGR of 27.2% and 26% over the forecast period
- Within Europe, Germany is projected to maintain one of the highest CAGRs at 21.3%
By industry, the IT and telecommunications sectors are expected to lead demand for container monitoring by 2026. Demand is also being driven by the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI), retail, and industrial sectors.
Container Monitoring Features
A 2020 survey by the Cloud-Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) found that 27% of participants, down from 34% in 2018, reported container monitoring as one of the challenges they face when deploying containers.
Since containers are ephemeral and share their resources, monitoring the right point of the network at the right time can be challenging. Especially when the right tools aren’t available.
Monitoring efficiency can be boosted and simplified by following a set of practices when monitoring containers, such as:
1. Contextualizing Alerts
With a large number of servers and physical resources, critical alerts could get lost.
When dealing with containerized applications and microservices, it’s important to add context to the alerts, increasing your chances of determining the component failure, whether it’s a resource or an interaction with another container.
2. Environment Visualization
Containers work on multiple levels and visualization of collected data is essential to peer into the various dimensions of a given issue, whether it’s related to nodes, pods, or clusters.
3. Automating Services Discovery
Services are constantly moving between containers, while containers themselves switch hosts and physical resources.
Automating the service discovery aspect of container monitoring would ensure your monitoring system isn’t disrupted, allowing you to keep track of clusters even when scaled.
4. Real-time Monitoring
While analyzing data at a later date can generate valuable long-term insights, the importance of container monitoring systems is the insights and alerts they offer in real-time.
Advanced container monitoring solutions tend to combine machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to track and analyze the most influential metrics.
5. Monitoring Container-to-Container Traffic
With containers, incoming network traffic is constantly moving between containers on the same machine.
It’s important to zoom in and track the flow of traffic between individual containers, not just between machines.
Container Monitoring in Modern IT Environments
Monitoring is a big part of successfully managing an IT environment. As containerized applications adopt a bigger role, it’s important to include them in the monitoring practices. However, containers can’t be monitored using the same methods and solutions as monitoring virtual machines and physical infrastructures.
They tend to work hand in hand with complex microservices architectures, where monitoring the performance of the CPU, GPU, and RAM doesn’t cover the full picture. Monitoring containers is distributed. It requires tracking of individually configured containers and how they perform in relation to one another.
“When it comes to container monitoring, you need to shift your focus from monitoring individual containers into monitoring the whole container cluster or at least a group of containers. It’s still beneficial to keep an eye on metrics from all individual containers,” says Dawid Ziolkowski in a post at Loggly.
“At the end of the day, each microservice acts as a mini-application. Monitoring individual containers can help you find the bottlenecks and weak spots.”
Benefits of Container Monitoring
Since containers are an essential part of the modern IT environment, container monitoring solutions have proven to be critical for smooth operations.
Notable benefits of container monitoring include:
- Identifying issues before they cause a problem
- Optimizing resource allocation
- Implementing changes effectively
- Improving containers security
- Providing real-time insights
- Providing later-date analytics
- Tracking application performance
“When organizations rely on containerized applications, like Docker, to run their business services or applications, container monitoring becomes essential to ensure high availability and performance of the applications running on them,” says Anugraha Benjamin in a post at ManageEngine.
“Since the Docker container architecture can be complex and dynamic in nature, you will need to monitor across the full stack to analyze the performance of containerized applications. … Tracking key performance metrics of your applications in this fashion will help you ensure maximum availability and optimize performance for containerized applications.”
Container Monitoring Use Cases
Container monitoring solutions and services are used by organizations in different industries to help keep track of and optimize their containerized applications:
Fintonic
Fintonic is a financial services company that provides mobile banking and personal financial planning services covering insurance, investment, and credit score. The Madrid-based company has over 700,000 users, with plans to expand into new countries.
When Fintonic doubled its user base and developed six new lines of businesses, it used Kubernetes containers for migrating its 60 microservices to the cloud.
Needing to monitor its new container-based infrastructure, Fintonic worked with Datadog due to its integration with Kubernetes.
“Configuring new alerts was incredibly tedious. It implied creating new config maps, associating them with Kubernetes logstash deployments, and had to be done for each environment,” says Roberto Ansuini, director of engineering, Fintonic.
“We used to have no way to look at things proactively, but we now have insights from Datadog across all our communication, such as Slack, emails, and VictorOps.”
Working with Datadog allowed Fintonic easy access to its containers’ insights and metrics, moving forward toward a 100% Kubernetes architecture.
Casasoft
Casasoft is one of the leading providers of digital real estate services. Based in Bottighofen, Switzerland, Casasoft offers web applications with CRM functionalities and 360-degree virtual tours of properties.
Growing to thousands of clients, Casasoft sought to ride the wave of success. Releasing a new software solution, Casaone, it wanted a highly automated and container-based solution to match.
Being a Nine client, Casasoft worked with them to guide the Casaone migration to the cloud, including management, monitoring, testing, and scaling.
“Thanks to containerization, we can divide our application Casaone into small, efficient packages, which we can in turn optimize, monitor and scale individually,” says Jens Stalder, full stack web developer, Casasoft.
“At the same time, we have been able to optimize our processes and make them leaner, which has led to enhanced transparency for the collaboration between teams and has improved communication. Nine’s competent advice has enabled a fast implementation.”
Working with Nine, Casasoft received phone support during the live migration and worked natively on one of Nine’s managed servers.
The Telegraph
The Telegraph is one of the U.K.’s leading news organizations.
The Telegraph name encompasses several websites, mobile apps, and print titles. Relying heavily on a microservices architecture, the newspaper was facing issues keeping up with its multi-platform approach, especially when working with third-party providers.
Working with Snyk Open Source, The Telegraph containerized its microservices using Kubernetes and included and monitored them through Snyk’s continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline.
“An important feature Snyk has is a very complete vulnerability database that classifies security issues. Since we had a road map of outstanding vulnerabilities, we could reduce our risk exposure right away by focusing on the high severity issues first,” says Ciro Rizzo, head of engineering, The Telegraph.
“The Snyk reports really helped our security and engineering teams prioritize vulnerability fixes since the early stage.”
The Telegraph was able to reduce exposure of sensitive data, secure its containerized architecture, and mitigated dependency on third-party providers.
Container Monitoring Providers
Some of the leading providers of container monitoring services and solutions in the market include:
- Splunk
- AppDynamics
- Datadog
- CA Technologies
- Sysdig
- Wavefront
- AWS
- BMC Software
- SignalFx
- Snyk
