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Container insights overview

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Container insights is a feature designed to monitor the performance of container workloads deployed to the cloud. It gives you performance visibility by collecting memory and processor metrics from controllers, nodes, and containers that are available in Kubernetes through the Metrics API. After you enable monitoring from Kubernetes clusters, metrics and Container logs are automatically collected for you through a containerized version of the Log Analytics agent for Linux. Metrics are sent to the metrics database in Azure Monitor. Log data is sent to your Log Analytics workspace.

Overview diagram of Container insights

Features of Container insights

Container insights deliver a comprehensive monitoring experience to understand the performance and health of your Kubernetes cluster and container workloads. You can:

  • Identify resource bottlenecks by identifying AKS containers running on the node and their processor and memory utilization.
  • Identify processor and memory utilization of container groups and their containers hosted in Azure 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.
  • 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.
  • Integrate with Prometheus to view application and workload metrics it collects from nodes and Kubernetes by using queries to create custom alerts and dashboards and perform detailed analysis.

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.

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.

Supported 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.

Next steps

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