Monitoring and observability with Docker

This path teaches you to build a monitoring and observability stack for your Docker containers, combining metrics, dashboards and centralized logs with open source tools. It is meant for anyone already running services in Docker with docker-compose who wants to stop guessing why a container is slow or has crashed.

What you’ll be able to do

By the end you’ll know how to deploy your own metrics system, visualize it in clear dashboards and centralize the logs from every container in one place, without depending on a paid SaaS. This is an intermediate-level path: it assumes you already know how to run services with docker-compose, expose ports and edit YAML files; no prior experience with Prometheus or Grafana is required.

How the path builds

It starts with the metrics engine: you install Prometheus, then add Node Exporter and cAdvisor, the exporters that give it visibility into the host and into each container separately. With those metrics flowing, Grafana comes in to turn them into dashboards you can read at a glance. The path then shifts toward logs: Grafana Loki centralizes records from the whole stack, while Dozzle lets you watch a container’s logs live straight from the browser, no terminal needed. It closes with three lightweight alternatives (Netdata, Glances and Beszel) for when a full Prometheus and Grafana setup is more than a small server needs. cAdvisor alone already exposes dozens of per-container metrics with no extra configuration, so you’ll see results from the very first step.