Docker Events & System Monitoring

Monitor Docker in real time with docker events, docker stats, and docker system info. Track container lifecycle events, resource usage, and daemon configuration.

System

Detailed Explanation

Real-Time Event Streaming

docker events streams events from the Docker daemon in real time:

# Watch all events
docker events

# Filter by event type
docker events --filter type=container

# Filter by specific events
docker events --filter event=start --filter event=stop --filter event=die

# Filter by container
docker events --filter container=my-app

# Show events since a timestamp
docker events --since "2024-01-15T10:00:00"

Event Types

Docker emits events for: container, image, volume, network, daemon, plugin, node, secret, service, config.

Resource Monitoring with docker stats

# Live stats for all containers
docker stats

# Stats for specific containers
docker stats web api db

# Single snapshot (for scripting)
docker stats --no-stream

# Custom format
docker stats --format "table {{.Name}}\t{{.CPUPerc}}\t{{.MemUsage}}\t{{.MemPerc}}\t{{.NetIO}}\t{{.BlockIO}}"

System Information

# Full system info
docker system info

# Specific fields
docker info --format '{{.ServerVersion}}'
docker info --format '{{.MemTotal}}'
docker info --format '{{.NCPU}}'
docker info --format '{{.OperatingSystem}}'

Health Monitoring Pattern

# Watch for containers dying
docker events --filter event=die --format '{{.Actor.Attributes.name}} died at {{.Time}}'

# Check if a container is healthy
docker inspect --format '{{.State.Health.Status}}' my-app

Use Case

Monitoring container health in production environments, building alerting systems based on Docker events, auditing container lifecycle for compliance, and debugging intermittent container crashes.

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