How to monitor Docker containers with Prometheus?

Question

I want to set up monitoring for my Docker containers. I've heard Prometheus + Grafana is the standard stack. How do I get started?

Neeraj Jha · Accepted Answer

**Use cAdvisor to expose container metrics, then scrape with Prometheus.**

Quick setup with Docker Compose:

```yaml
services:
  prometheus:
    image: prom/prometheus
    ports: ["9090:9090"]
    volumes:
      - ./prometheus.yml:/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml

grafana:
    image: grafana/grafana
    ports: ["3000:3000"]

cadvisor:
    image: gcr.io/cadvisor/cadvisor
    ports: ["8080:8080"]
    volumes:
      - /:/rootfs:ro
      - /var/run:/var/run:ro
      - /sys:/sys:ro
      - /var/lib/docker:/var/lib/docker:ro
```

See our full [Monitoring with Prometheus & Grafana](/blog/monitoring-prometheus-grafana) article for dashboards and alerting.

How to monitor Docker containers with Prometheus?

Your Answer

1 Answer