ConMon: An automated container based network performance monitoring system

Abstract

The popularity of container technologies and their widespread usage for building microservices demands solutions dedicated for efficient monitoring of containers and their interactions. In this paper we present ConMon, an automated system for monitoring the network performance of container-based applications. It automatically identifies newly instantiated application containers and observes passively their traffic. Based on these observations, it configures and executes monitoring functions inside adjacent monitoring containers. The system adapts the monitoring containers to changes driven by either the application or the execution platform. The evaluation results validate the feasibility of the ConMon approach and illustrate its scalability in terms of low overhead on compute resources, moderate impact on applications, and negligible impact on the background network traffic.