So far, we have been looking at the tools and services you host yourself. Along with these self-hosted tools, a large amount of cloud-based software has developed around Docker as a service ecosystem. In this chapter, we will look at the following topics:
- Why use a SaaS service over self-hosted or real-time metrics?
- What services are available and what do they offer?
- Installation of agents for Sysdig Cloud, Datadog, and New Relic on the host machines
- Configuration of the agents to ship metrics
So far, to work through the examples in this module, we have used locally hosted virtual servers that are launched using vagrant. During this chapter, we are going to use services that need to be able to communicate with your host machine, so rather than trying to do this using your local machine, its about time you took your host machine into the cloud.
As we are going to start and stop the remote hosts while we look at the services, it pays to use a public cloud, as we only get charged for what we use.
There are several public cloud services that you can use to evaluate the tools covered in this chapter, which one you choose to use is up to you, you could use:
- Digital Ocean: https://www.digitalocean.com/
- Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com/
- Microsoft Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/
- VMware vCloud Air: http://vcloud.vmware.com/
Or use your own preferred provider, the only pre-requisite is that your server is publically accessible.
This chapter assumes that you are capable of launching either a CentOS 7 or Ubuntu 14.04 cloud instance and you understand that you will likely incur charges while the cloud instance is up and running.
Once you have launched your cloud instance, you can bootstrap Docker in the same way that you installed using vagrant. In the chapter 6 folder of the Git repository, there are two separate scripts to download and install the Docker engine and compose it on your cloud instance.
To install Docker, ensure that your cloud instance is updated by running:
sudo yum update
For the CentOS instance of your Ubuntu, run the following command:
sudo apt-get update
Once updated, run the following command to install the software. Due to the differences in the way different cloud environments are configured, it is best to switch over to the root user to run the remainder of the commands, to do this, run:
sudo su -
Now you will be able to run the install script using the following command:
curl -fsS https://raw.githubusercontent.com/russmckendrick/monitoring-docker/master/chapter06/install_docker/install_docker.sh | bash
To check that everything works as expected, run the following command:
docker run hello-world
You should see something similar to the terminal output, as shown in the following screenshot:
We can start to look at the SaaS services once you have Docker up and running.