GroundWork, Inc., the leading Unified Monitoring solution for IT operations management and cloud monitoring, releases GroundWork BoxSpy, designed specifically to monitor Docker and other Linux container environments. GroundWork BoxSpy is the most resource-efficient, comprehensive monitoring system available for today’s container technologies.

“Docker and containers represent a newer, often better way for developers, lines of business and organizations to develop and package applications, but for enterprise IT teams there are still significant gaps in terms of security and other concerns compared to traditional VMs,” says Jay Lyman, Research Manager for 451 Research. “One of the areas that is lacking for Docker and containers is monitoring, where BoxSpy can help provide the capabilities required for enterprise deployment.”

Benefits of monitoring Docker containers with GroundWork BoxSpy:
• Works ‘out-of-the-box’ with GroundWork, but also has a REST API that makes it compatible with other monitoring technologies
• Lives in a container and is capable of monitoring other containers running on thesame system
• Designed for both DevOps and production environments
• Adds full-featured enterprise monitoring to Docker environments with the ability to correlate Docker performance with the rest of the IT environment
• Designed for dynamic environments — automatically monitors new Docker containers as you spin them up

“Dynamic environments, like those based on Linux containers, tend to break IT monitoring or at best render them cumbersome and complicated.  You can’t be very dynamic if your management tools can’t keep up with the speed of change,” said David Dennis, VP of Marketing and Products for GroundWork. “Also, running Linux containers in production requires the ability to see container performance data next to performance data from the rest of the infrastructure – the compute, network and storage components.  If you can’t do that, you can’t optimize your application scale out. We’re happy to have worked with Docker personnel to make BoxSpy solve both problems.”

BoxSpy is based on Google’s cAdvisor container monitoring technology and improves it by:
• Dramatically reducing the resource demand and performance impact
• API clean-up and bug-fixing
• Removing unnecessary overhead that isn’t needed when talking to an external monitoring system
• Normalizing metrics to make them more human readable and standardized
• Adding threshold setting
• Adding process monitoring

BoxSpy is available, either as an installable binary or source for local compilation, at: https://github.com/gwos/boxspy.