OpenTelemetry Docker Monitoring

Docker has gained popularity due to its ability to simplify application deployment, improve scalability, and increase development productivity. It has become a standard tool in many software development and deployment workflows.

By using the OpenTelemetry Docker Stats receiver, you can gather container-level metrics from Docker and integrate them into your observability infrastructure for monitoring and analysis purposes.

What is OpenTelemetry Collector?

OpenTelemetry Docker Stats

OpenTelemetry Docker Stats receiver allows you to collect container-level resource metrics from Docker. It retrieves metrics such as CPU usage, memory usage, network statistics, and disk I/O from Docker containers and exposes them as OpenTelemetry metrics.

::: details CPU metrics

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::: details Memory metrics

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::: details BlockIO metrics

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::: details Network metrics

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Usage

OpenTelemetry Docker Stats receiver provides a convenient way to collect performance metrics from Docker containers, which can help you monitor the health and performance of your containerized applications.

To start monitoring Docker, you need to configure Docker Stats receiver in /etc/otel-contrib-collector/config.yaml using your Uptrace DSN:

receivers:
  docker_stats:
    endpoint: unix:///var/run/docker.sock
    collection_interval: 15s
    container_labels_to_metric_labels:
      my.container.label: my-metric-label
      my.other.container.label: my-other-metric-label
    env_vars_to_metric_labels:
      MY_ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLE: my-metric-label
      MY_OTHER_ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLE: my-other-metric-label
    excluded_images:
      - undesired-container
      - /.*undesired.*/
      - another-*-container
    metrics:
      container.cpu.usage.percpu:
        enabled: true
      container.network.io.usage.tx_dropped:
        enabled: false

exporters:
  otlp:
    endpoint: otlp.uptrace.dev:4317
    headers: { 'uptrace-dsn': '<FIXME>' }

processors:
  resourcedetection:
    detectors: [env, system]
  cumulativetodelta:
  batch:
    timeout: 10s

service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      receivers: [otlp]
      processors: [batch]
      exporters: [otlp]
    metrics:
      receivers: [otlp, docker_stats]
      processors: [cumulativetodelta, batch, resourcedetection]
      exporters: [otlp]

Note that the config above uses /var/run/docker.sock Unix socket to communicate with Docker so you need to make sure the Otel Collector can access it.

Alternatively, you can configure Docker daemon to also listen on 0.0.0.0:2375 and adjust the Otel Collector config accordingly:

receivers:
  docker_stats:
    endpoint: http://localhost:2375

See documentation for more details.

OpenTelemetry Backend

Once the metrics are collected and exported, you can visualize them using a compatible backend system. For example, you can use Uptrace to create dashboards that display metrics from the OpenTelemetry Collector.

What's next?