Monitoring windows docker containers using Application Insights Status Monitor

There is severe shortage of tools for monitoring windows containers in general and specifically from inside running container OS. Steps outlined below will allow you to get basic OS health information (perfmon counters) as well as application level monitors from ASP.NET application.

Overview of the steps a below

1. Create application insights resource in Azure
2. Install and enable Application Insights status monitor into container
3. Modify configuration file to add additional monitoring counters

• Create application insights resource in Azure

New-AzureRmApplicationInsights -ResourceGroupName artisticcheese -Name appinsights -Location SouthCentralUS -Kind web

After resource is created find instrumentation key for it to supply to status monitor during runtime

PS Azure:\> Get-AzureRmApplicationInsights -Name appinsights -ResourceGroupName artisticcheese | select InstrumentationKey

InstrumentationKey
------------------
3c069cb6-fc1a-4bab-974c-0a4245ae7f1b

• Install Application Insights Status Monitor inside container

Application Insights Status Monitor is distributed via WebPI installer which is dependent on UI part for installation which obviously is not going to work neither for server core installation or windows docker container. Below is extracted necessary parts to make it work in windows container (shall work in server core install as well)

	WORKDIR prep
	RUN Invoke-WebRequest "https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=517856" -UseBasicParsing -OutFile appinsights.msi; `
	Start-Process -filepath "appinsights.msi" -ArgumentList "/quiet" -PassThru | Wait-Process; `
	Remove-Item .\* -recurse -force -Verbose
	RUN Import-Module 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft Application Insights\Status Monitor\PowerShell\Microsoft.Diagnostics.Agent.StatusMonitor.PowerShell.dll'; `
	Start-ApplicationInsightsMonitoring -Name 'default web site' -InstrumentationKey '3c069cb6-fc1a-4bab-974c-0a4245ae7f1b'

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a.dockerfile
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• Test application and integration

If you onboarded Azure AppInsights successfully you shall be able to see your live container under Live Metric Stream. It will show your current vital status of your container like memory use/CPU and Request information in real time.

Make couple of hits to application to populate Application Insights data in Azure.

PS C:\> Invoke-WebRequest http://172.17.228.181/Service.svc/qod | select Content

Content
-------
Sustenance! Your health is always the best prescription. 

If you go to any of the captured transactions now you shall be able to see breakdown of entire pipeline (including call to a backend dependency)

API which is being used (quote of the day) is limited to 10 hits an hour, continue hitting on web service 10 more time and you shall be start seeing failures in calls reflected inside AppInsights as well

• Modify configuration file for adding additional monitoring data

You can add additonal perfmon data to be logged to application insights portal in addition to default set for ASP.NET. Open ApplicationInsights.config file in root of your application and check commented part under <Add Type=”Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.Extensibility.PerfCounterCollector.PerformanceCollectorModule, Microsoft.AI.PerfCounterCollector”> tag

You can check how this works by checking repo (https://github.com/artisticcheese/artisticcheesecontainer/tree/master/appinsightscontainer). Image is also published to docker hub as artisticcheese/appinsights. Since I put my appinsights instrumentation key there it’s not going to help much but you can clone my repo and put your own key and see how it works.