CA Technologies unveils docker container monitoring trends

Containers offer immense value to enterprises by allowing developers to easily build, ship and run any application virtually anywhere, as a lightweight, self-sufficient package. In turn, organizations benefit from the ability to enable instant application portability. According to a recent Gartner study of 664 respondents, "65% of respondents stated that their organization expected to deploy containers into production by the end of 2017...Further, an additional 13% expect to deploy containers during 2018, suggesting that interest and adoption will only increase." 

"Digital transformation initiatives increasingly rely on cloud-based containerized applications that cannot be managed with traditional IT monitoring tools," said Ali Siddiqui, general manager of the Agile Operations, CA Technologies. "These new app architectures create blind-spots or worse, a surge of false alarms that prevent teams from fixing problems quickly. CA Technologies unique approach to container monitoring delivers full visibility in these most dynamic environments."

Despite their benefits, containerized application environments have created exponential complexity in cloud-based application management and monitoring. Key container challenges and trends identified in the new survey include:

• Docker popularity is rising. But more than 50 percent of organizations surveyed say their use of Docker container technology is "just getting started."
• App development and testing is the primary Docker use case. Most executives surveyed said they use Docker container technology for application development and testing (61 percent) and to reduce their existing infrastructure (53 percent).
• Docker provides the most value when it comes to continuous delivery, scalability and resource efficiency. More than half of executives indicated that Docker containers provide continuation integration and delivery (58 percent), scalability (57 percent) and resource efficiency (53 percent).
• The skills gap is biggest in Docker monitoring, according to respondents (48 percent).
• The business impact of Docker container performance is largely unmeasured today. More than half of executives (56 percent) said they are not monitoring Docker container performance problems for business impact yet.
• Complete visibility of container performance is the biggest motivator for organizations, according to 56 percent of executives.

Container monitoring has become an essential application performance management tool for DevOps to rapidly develop and deploy innovative, cloud-based applications. However, as Docker and other container adoption continues to expand, so do the challenges around it.

To address the monitoring challenges associated with next-generation container environments, CA Application Performance Management (CA APM), is a robust solution that combines agentless metric collection at a cluster level with a Docker flow mapping service. CA APM surfaces important service-level metrics in the context of dynamic microservice relationships and container dependencies that typify distributed application architectures.