Announcing Public Preview - OMS Container Solution for Linux

What is OMS Container Solution for Linux?

Docker container is an open-source technology that you can use to build, run, test, and deploy distributed applications inside software containers. Because containers are lightweight, pared-down virtual machines that can be easily provisioned, developers have created them sporadically as a solution to support their continuous delivery. As containers are being used widely in production and are exploding in numbers, demand for container monitoring has increased. A centralized approach to logging and monitoring is required. OMS Container Solution for Linux helps with these needs.

Solution container.

What does the OMS Container Solution do?

With the OMS Container Solution, you'll be able to:

  • Centralize and correlate millions of logs from Docker containers at scale
  • See real-time information about Container status, image, and affinity
  • Quickly diagnose "noisy neighbor" containers that can cause problems on Container hosts
  • Retrieve, visualize, and monitor CPU, memory, storage, and network usage with 10-second real-time performance metrics
  • View detailed and secure audit trail of all Docker actions on Container hosts

Which Linux operating system and Docker versions do you support?

The Docker Container Solution supports a wide varieties of the Linux operating systems. If you see any operating system type and version that is not supported and that you would like to see supported, please let us know. Docker Version 1.8 thru 1.11.2.

  • Supported Linux Operating System (x64)
    • Ubuntu 14.04, 15.10
    • CoreOS(stable)
    • Amazon Linux 2016.03
    • openSUSE 13.2
    • CentOS 7
    • SLES 12
    • RHEL 7.2

How do I install the Container Solution?

Depending on the operating system, we have created two ways to install the Container Solution.

  • OMS Agent For Linux
  • Docker Hub

We have created two types of installation methods to support different operating system types, such as CoreOS.

3-OMS-082416

Installing using OMS Agent for Linux

Make sure you have Docker running on your hosts, and then run the OMS Linux Agent installer. It’s that simple. By installing the OMS Linux Agent on the host directly, you can also get the benefit of gathering information such as host syslog as well.

Install from Docker Hub

Because CoreOS does not allow installation of agents on the host, we created a containerized version of the agent that you can download and run as normal.  The OMS Agent in the container will listen to other containers and will send data to the OMS Service. This will only capture the container monitoring information and pass it to OMS. This is a great scenario for cloud services whose monitoring process should be concise. It is easily installed using “docker run”.

For a detailed installation step by step for both type of installations, please go to the Container Solution documentation.

View your Docker Container data in OMS

After the agent is installed, you should begin to see log and search data flow to OMS.

Before you start your search, here are the types of logs that OMS captures. We capture inventory logs, event status, and performance data. For more information about how to construct your query, go to Log Search in Log Analytics.

  • ContainerInventory – Use this type when you want information about where containers are located, what their names are, and what images they’re running.
  • ContainerImageInventory – Use this type when you’re trying to find information organized by image and get image information such as image IDs or sizes.
  • ContainerLog – Use this type when you want to find specific error log information and entries.
  • ContainerServiceLog – Use this type when you’re trying to find audit trail information for the Docker daemon, such as start, stop, delete, or pull commands.
  • Perf – Use this type when you want to understand the container performance, such as processor%, memory, network, and disk I/O usage.

Now go to Log Analytics where you will see Search all your container data gathered, and type the following: Type=ContainerInventory.

Log Analytics where you can filter data.

I would like to try this immediately!!

Get a free Microsoft Operations Management Suite (#MSOMS) subscription so that you can test the Container Solution features. You can also get a free subscription for Microsoft Azure.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter and the Microsoft OMS Facebook site. If you want to learn more about Container Solution and OMS, visit the Hey, Scripting Guy! Blog.

How can I give you guys feedback?

There are a few different routes to give feedback:

Your feedback is most important to us. It does not matter if it is good or bad. We want to make the product better.

Also, stay tuned for more exciting information about the Container Solution.

Keiko Harada
Program Manager
Microsoft Operations Management Team