Azure Container Instances debugging tools

This article lists the debugging tools that you can use on Microsoft Azure Container Instances.

List of debugging tools

• Liveness probe

  A liveness probe checks whether a container is running and responding within a specified interval.

  Feature	Use case	Example
  High availability and resilience	Making sure that your containers are always available and resilient to failures	Deploying a web application that has multiple instances of containers behind a load balancer. The liveness probe checks whether each container is responsive. If a container becomes unresponsive, Container Instances automatically restarts the container to maintain high availability.
  Health monitoring and autorecovery	Monitoring the health of your containers and automatically recovering from failures	Running a microservice that processes messages from a queue. The liveness probe verifies that the container can handle requests. If the service becomes unhealthy (for example, because of memory exhaustion or a deadlock), Container Instances restarts the container to restore service.
  Graceful shutdown and cleanup	Making sure that containers shut down gracefully during scaling events or maintenance	Allowing existing requests to finish before terminating the container while scaling down a service. This action prevents data loss or incomplete transactions.
  Custom health checks	Implementing custom health checks that are specific to your application	A container that's running a database server using a liveness probe that connects to the database and verifies its responsiveness. If the database becomes unresponsive, Container Instances can restart the container or trigger an alert.
  Handling initialization failures	Detecting whether the container initializes correctly after startup	Checking whether the required dependencies are available before the container starts accepting traffic.

• Container logging and events

  To store and query the logging and event data, we recommend that you use a centralized location, such as a Log Analytics workspace.

  Feature	Use case	Example
  Troubleshooting application errors	Identifying and diagnosing application errors or crashes that occur within the container (if application logging is configured)	Analyzing container logs to pinpoint the source of a "500 Internal Server Error" event that's reported by the application.
  Troubleshooting container events	Detecting container creation failures	Analyzing an event that displays the details of a container not starting because of an image pull failure.

• Application Insights

• The "ping -t" or "tail -f /dev/null" command during container creation (if the container continually exists and restarts)

• Commands that are run within a running container

  Feature	Use case	Example
  Command execution	Running commands for troubleshooting inside a container	Accessing the container's Bash shell to investigate application errors and diagnose issues interactively.
  Troubleshooting performance	Running performance commands to diagnose issues	Running the free command in the container to identify memory bottlenecks that cause application slowdowns.

• Container group updating

Contact us for help

If you have questions or need help, create a support request, or ask Azure community support. You can also submit product feedback to Azure feedback community.