cAdvisor

cAdvisor (Container Advisor) is a daemon that monitors running containers and the host machine to provide visibility into resource usage and performance characteristics. It collects, aggregates, processes, and exports container-level and machine-wide statistics.

Key Features

• Per-container metrics including CPU, memory, filesystem, and network statistics
• Historical resource usage with summaries and histograms
• Built-in web UI for interactive inspection of container and host metrics
• Versioned remote REST API for raw and processed stats
• Export support via storage plugins for external backends
• Works with Docker and is designed to support other container runtimes via a container abstraction model

Use Cases

• Monitoring container resource consumption on single hosts
• Feeding container metrics into an observability pipeline via supported exports
• Troubleshooting noisy-neighbor and resource isolation issues in container environments

Limitations and Considerations

• Accurate collection typically requires elevated access and visibility into host/container runtime paths and kernel interfaces
• Feature availability and metric detail can vary depending on container runtime and host OS configuration

cAdvisor is a practical foundation for container monitoring, offering both a lightweight UI for quick inspection and APIs/exports for integration into larger monitoring stacks. It is commonly deployed as a host-level daemon, including in orchestrated environments where per-node metrics are needed.