INTROSPECTION DRIVEN MONITORING OF MULTI-CONTAINER APPLICATIONS

• US 20190190803A1
• Filed: 02/19/2019
• Published: 06/20/2019
• Est. Priority Date: 03/29/2017
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: CA, Inc. (d/b/a CA Technologies) (Broadcom, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: CA, Inc. (d/b/a CA Technologies) (Broadcom, Inc.)
• Inventors: Joshi, Prabodh, Emeis, Mark, Engquist, James Douglas, Church, Dann M.
• Granted Patent: US 10,594,582 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2009/45591 Monitoring or debugging support
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2009/45595 Network integration; Enabling network access in virtual machine instances
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 8/60 Software deployment
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 8/77 Software metrics
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/45558 Hypervisor-specific management and integration aspects
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/0816 the condition being an adaptation, e.g. in response to network events
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/5096 wherein the managed service relates to distributed or central networked applications
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 43/08 Monitoring or testing based on specific metrics, e.g. QoS, energy consumption or environmental parameters
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 43/091 Measuring contribution of individual network components to actual service level
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 43/14 using software, i.e. software packages network security related monitoring H04L63/1408
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 43/16 Threshold monitoring
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 43/20 the monitoring system or the monitored elements being virtualised, abstracted or software-defined entities, e.g. SDN or NFV
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/025 for remote control or remote monitoring of applications

Abstract

Provided is a process, including: obtaining a composition record defining at least one service of a multi-container application; selecting a plurality of infrastructure or application performance monitoring agents based on the composition record defining the multi-container application; causing the selected agents to be deployed on one or more computing devices executing the multi-container application; receiving metrics or events from the agents indicative of performance of at least part of the multi-container application or at least some of the one or more computing devices executing the multi-container application; and causing an indication of the received metrics or events to be presented.

Claims

1. A tangible, non-transitory, machine-readable medium storing instructions that when executed by one or more processors effectuate operations comprising:

obtaining, with one or more processors, a composition record defining at least one service of a multi-container application, wherein;

the multi-container application comprises a plurality of containers configured to run in one or more instances of a container engine executing on one or more computing devices,

the containers each contain a respective application component of the multi-container application and respective dependencies of the respective application component,

the composition record specifies a respective image identifier or build file-system-path of respective application components that, when executed, implement respective services of the multi-container application,

selecting, with one or more processors, a plurality of infrastructure or application performance monitoring agents based on the composition record defining the multi-container application;

causing, with one or more processors, the selected agents to be deployed on one or more computing devices executing the multi-container application;

receiving, with one or more processors, metrics or events from the agents indicative of performance of at least part of the multi-container application or at least some of the one or more computing devices executing the multi-container application; and

causing, with one or more processors, an indication of the received metrics or events to be presented.

2. The medium of claim 1, wherein:

a kernel of an operating system of at least one of the one or more computing devices executing the multi-container application executes a plurality of the containers in respective user-space instances isolated from one another;

the composition record is a compose file stored in persistent memory and encoded in a human-readable data serialization language;

the multi-container application comprises more than three containers corresponding to more than three difference services in a service-oriented logical architecture of the multi-container application;

selecting a plurality of agents comprises selecting a plurality of agents based on respective tokens corresponding to the selected agents parsed from the compose file;

causing the selected agents to be deployed comprises causing at least a plurality of the selected agents to be deployed in a monitoring container configured to monitor performance of other containers in the multi-container application;

the dependencies include a version of a library called by at least one application component and a version of a framework that calls at least one application component; and

the metric or events indicate an amount of a storage volume used or amounts of reads from or writes to a storage volume.

3. The medium of claim 1, wherein:

selecting the plurality of infrastructure or application performance monitoring agents comprises selecting an agent based on a network port number specified by the composition record.

4. The medium of claim 3, wherein the operations comprise:

parsing the composition record to detect a pattern including a key indicative of a port specification, a colon indicating a pairing of the key with a value, and a value comprising a sequence of network port numbers delimited by a delimiter character;

splitting a string including the sequence of network port numbers according to the delimiter character to form an array; and

iterating through the array and comparing items in the array to records in a mapping between network port numbers and types of agents.

5. The medium of claim 1, comprising:

parsing the composition record;

detecting a token in the composition record;

determining that the token corresponds to a service; and

determining that the service corresponds to a service-specific agent, wherein;

selecting the plurality of infrastructure or application performance monitoring agents comprises selecting the service-specific agent.

6. The medium of claim 1, comprising:

identifying a provider of a given container of the multi-container application based on the composition record, wherein;

at least some of the selected agents are selected based on the identified provider.

8. The medium of claim 1, wherein causing the selected agents to be deployed comprises adding an image identifier of a container image that includes the selected agent to the composition record.

9. The medium of claim 1, wherein the selected agents include an infrastructure agent configured to obtain metrics of one of the one or more computing devices executing the multi-container application, the metrics including an amount of processor utilization.

10. The medium of claim 1, wherein the selected agents include an application performance monitor agent configured to obtain run-times of one or more routines of one of the application components, the run-times each corresponding to a during of time a routine takes to service a portion of a transaction serviced by a plurality of routines.

11. The medium of claim 1, wherein:

a given one of the selected agents is configured to monitor a corresponding container of the multi-container application via a Java Management Extension interface without the given one of the selected agents executing in a shared user-space instance with the corresponding container.

12. The medium of claim 1, comprising:

adjusting configurations of one or more agents based on the composition record, wherein adjusting configurations comprises;

changing a metric monitored;

changing a threshold for an alarm; and

determining an interface by which information is ingested by a selected agent.

13. The medium of claim 1, comprising:

accessing, with a given agent, a packet sent or received by a given container of the multi-container application;

adjusting a configuration of the given agent based on the packet.

14. The medium of claim 1, comprising:

accessing, with a given agent, a packet sent or received by a given container of the multi-container application by reading a value from a network interface buffer either on the buffer or in system memory allocated to a driver of the network interface; and

adding another agent to monitor the multi-container application based on the packet.

15. The medium of claim 1, wherein:

selecting a plurality of infrastructure or application performance monitoring agents comprises steps for selecting agents.

16. The medium of claim 1, comprising:

orchestrating the multi-container application with a platform agnostic orchestration application.

17. The medium of claim 1, wherein:

the composition record is a Docker-standard compliant compose file or a Kubernetes-standard compliant manifest.

7. The medium of 6, wherein:

the at least one of the selected agents is selected based on the identified provider, an identifier of the given container in the composition record, and a network port number listed in the composition record.

18. A method comprising:

obtaining, with one or more processors, a composition record defining at least one service of a multi-container application, wherein;

the multi-container application comprises a plurality of containers configured to run in one or more instances of a container engine executing on one or more computing devices,

the containers each contain a respective application component of the multi-container application and respective dependencies of the respective application component,

the composition record specifies a respective image identifier or build file-system-path of respective application components that, when executed, implement respective services of the multi-container application,

selecting, with one or more processors, a plurality of infrastructure or application performance monitoring agents based on the composition record defining the multi-container application;

causing, with one or more processors, the selected agents to be deployed on one or more computing devices executing the multi-container application;

receiving, with one or more processors, metrics or events from the agents indicative of performance of at least part of the multi-container application or at least some of the one or more computing devices executing the multi-container application; and

causing, with one or more processors, an indication of the received metrics or events to be presented.

19. The method of claim 18, comprising:

identifying a provider of a given container of the multi-container application based on the composition record, wherein;

at least some of the selected agents are selected based on the identified provider, and

selecting the plurality of infrastructure or application performance monitoring agents comprises selecting an agent based on a network port number specified by the composition record.

20. The method of claim 18, comprising:

parsing the composition record;

detecting a token in the composition record;

determining that the token corresponds to a service; and

determining that the service corresponds to a service-specific agent, wherein;

selecting the plurality of infrastructure or application performance monitoring agents comprises selecting the service-specific agent.