Dockerfile for building and running a netdata deamon for your host instance.

Netdata monitors your server with thoughts of performance and memory usage, providing detailed insight into very recent server metrics. It's nice, and now it's also dockerized.

More info about project: https://github.com/firehol/netdata

docker run -d --cap-add SYS_PTRACE \
           -v /proc:/host/proc:ro \
           -v /sys:/host/sys:ro \
           -p 19999:19999 titpetric/netdata

Open a browser on http://server:19999/ and watch how your server is doing.

Netdata supports fetching container data from docker.sock. You can forward it to the netdata container with:

-v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock

This will allow netdata to resolve container names.

Note: forwarding docker.sock exposes the administrative docker API. If due to some security issue access has been obtained to the container, it will expose full docker API, allowing to stop, create or delete containers, as well as download new images in the host.

TL;DR If you care about security, consider forwarding a secure docker socket with docker-proxy-acl

It's possible to pass a NETDATA_PORT environment variable with -e, to start up netdata on a different port.

docker run -e NETDATA_PORT=80 [...]

Docker needs to run with the SYS_PTRACE capability. Without it, the mapped host/proc filesystem is not fully readable to the netdata deamon, more specifically the "apps" plugin:

16-01-12 07:58:16: ERROR: apps.plugin: Cannot process /host/proc/1/io (errno 13, Permission denied)

See the following link for more details: /proc/1/environ is unavailable in a container that is not priviledged

In addition to the above requirements and limitations, monitoring the complete network interface list of the host is not possible from within the Docker container. If you're running netdata and want to graph all the interfaces available on the host, you will have to use --net=host mode.

See the following link for more details: network interfaces missing when mounting proc inside a container

Netdata provides monitoring via a plugin architecture. This plugin supports many projects that don't provide data over the /proc filesystem. When you're running netdata in the container, you will have difficulty providing many of these paths to the netdata container.

What you do get (even with the docker version) is:

• Host CPU statististics
• Host Network I/O, QoS
• Host Disk I/O
• Applications monitoring
• Container surface metrics (cpu/disk per name)

You will not get detailed application metrics (mysql, etc.) from other containers or from the host if running netdata in a container. It may be possible to get some of those metrics, but it might not be easy, and most likely not worth it. For most detailed metrics, netdata needs to share the same environment as the application server it monitors. This means it would need to run either in the same container (not even remotely practical), or in the same virtual machine (no containers).

What I can tell you is that it's very stable, and snappy. Godspeed!