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Container insights overview

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Container insights is a feature of Azure Monitor that monitors the performance and health of container workloads deployed to Azure or that are managed by Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes. It collects memory and processor metrics from controllers, nodes, and containers in addition to gathering container logs. You can analyze the collected data for the different components in your cluster with a collection of views and pre-built workbooks.

The following video provides an intermediate-level deep dive to help you learn about monitoring your AKS cluster with Container insights. The video refers to Azure Monitor for Containers, which is the previous name for Container insights.

Features of Container insights

Container insights includes the following features to provide to understand the performance and health of your Kubernetes cluster and container workloads:

  • Identify resource bottlenecks by identifying containers running on each node and their processor and memory utilization.
  • Identify processor and memory utilization of container groups and their containers hosted in container instances.
  • View the controller's or pod's overall performance by identifying where the container resides in a controller or a pod.
  • Review the resource utilization of workloads running on the host that are unrelated to the standard processes that support the pod.
  • Identify capacity needs and determine the maximum load that the cluster can sustain by understanding the behavior of the cluster under average and heaviest loads.
  • Access live container logs and metrics generated by the container engine to help with troubleshooting issues in real time.
  • Configure alerts to proactively notify you or record when CPU and memory utilization on nodes or containers exceed your thresholds, or when a health state change occurs in the cluster at the infrastructure or nodes health rollup.

Access Container insights

Access Container insights in the Azure portal from Containers in the Monitor menu or directly from the selected AKS cluster by selecting Insights. The Azure Monitor menu gives you the global perspective of all the containers that are deployed and monitored. This information allows you to search and filter across your subscriptions and resource groups. You can then drill into Container insights from the selected container. Access Container insights for a particular AKS container directly from the AKS page.

Screenshot that shows an overview of methods to access Container insights.

Data collected

Container insights sends data to Logs and Metrics where you can analyze it using different features of Azure Monitor. It works with other Azure services such as Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus and Managed Grafana for complete monitoring of your Kubernetes cluster and your container workloads. For more information on these other services, see Monitoring data.

Diagram of collection of monitoring data from Kubernetes cluster using Container insights and related services.

Supported configurations

Container insights supports the following configurations:

Container insights supports clusters running the Linux and Windows Server 2019 operating system. The container runtimes it supports are Moby and any CRI-compatible runtime such as CRI-O and ContainerD. Docker is no longer supported as a container runtime as of September 2022. For more information about this deprecation, see the AKS release notes.

Note

Container insights support for Windows Server 2022 operating system is in public preview.

Frequently asked questions

This section provides answers to common questions.

Is there support for collecting Kubernetes audit logs for ARO clusters?

No. Container insights don't support collection of Kubernetes audit logs.

Does Container Insights support pod sandboxing?

Yes, Container Insights supports pod sandboxing through support for Kata Containers. For more details on pod sandboxing in AKS, refer to the AKS docs.

Next steps

To begin monitoring your Kubernetes cluster, review Enable Container insights to understand the requirements and available methods to enable monitoring.