Microsoft Previews Open Docker Container Monitoring

As open source platforms and tools have become prevalent in today's technology stacks, the need for monitoring them has taken on importance. Last week, Microsoft announced its OMS Monitoring Agent for Linux, designed for real-time visibility into Linux workloads.

Now, Microsoft is announcing the preview of OMS Docker Container monitoring. It provides visibility into container inventories, performance, and logs from one place. It's aimed at users who want a simplified view of containers’ usage, and it can diagnose issues whether your containers are running in the cloud or on-premises.

Microsoft's commitmet to Linux and open source is on the rise. It has brought .NET Core, PowerShell, and SQL Server to Linux. And the company open sourced Visual Studio Code and, just recently, PowerShell, as covered here.

According to a Microsoft post from LinuxCon in Toronto:

"One of the areas we are focused on is delivering open management solutions. In today’s multi-cloud, multi-OS world, customers need simple, unified tools to reduce complexity. That’s why just last week, we announced that we’re open sourcing PowerShell and making it available on Linux. Now PowerShell users across Windows and Linux can use our popular command-line shell and scripting language to manage almost everything from almost anywhere. My colleague Jeffrey Snover wrote a fantastic story about the journey to open source PowerShell and how customer-centricity brought us here – go check it out!

We’re also investing in making Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS), which gives you visibility and control of your applications and workloads across Azure and other clouds, a first-class tool for managing Linux environments. Last week, we announced that the OMS Monitoring Agent for Linux is generally available, delivering rich insights and real-time visibility into customers’ Linux workloads to quickly remediate issues. A lot of the tools we use and integrate with are open source-based, such as fluentd and integration with auditd and the like.

Today, I’m also excited to share that OMS Docker Container monitoring is available in preview. By nature, containers are lightweight and easily provisioned, so without a centralized approach to monitoring, customers may find it difficult to manage and respond to critical issues quickly. With OMS Docker Container monitoring, you get visibility into your container inventory, performance, and logs from one place, get a simplified view of containers’ usage, and can diagnose issues whether your containers are running in the cloud or on-premises. You may have seen Mark Russinovich demo this live at DockerCon in June, and we’re thrilled you can try it for yourself."

 Microsoft also supplied an update on Linux and Azure (the company previously said that more than 20 percent of the Azure cloud is Linux-based):

"Our experiences with Linux in Azure, where nearly 1 in 3 VMs today are Linux, have brought us closer to our customers and what they need to succeed in a rapidly advancing world. Microsoft is committed to contributing and participating in open source projects, like our investments in OMI and fluentd, our focus on Chakra and TypeScript, and many other projects including the fantastic work from our Microsoft Research organization."

 You can you visit the Azure.com website on Linux to learn more, and we will be covering more announcements out of LinuxCon this week.