:title: Runtime Metrics
:description: Measure the behavior of running containers
:keywords: docker, metrics, CPU, memory, disk, IO, run, runtime

.. _run_metrics:


Runtime Metrics
===============

Linux Containers rely on `control groups
<https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cgroups/cgroups.txt>`_ which
not only track groups of processes, but also expose metrics about CPU,
memory, and block I/O usage. You can access those metrics and obtain
network usage metrics as well. This is relevant for "pure" LXC
containers, as well as for Docker containers.

Control Groups
--------------

Control groups are exposed through a pseudo-filesystem. In recent
distros, you should find this filesystem under
``/sys/fs/cgroup``. Under that directory, you will see multiple
sub-directories, called devices, freezer, blkio, etc.; each
sub-directory actually corresponds to a different cgroup hierarchy.

On older systems, the control groups might be mounted on ``/cgroup``,
without distinct hierarchies. In that case, instead of seeing the
sub-directories, you will see a bunch of files in that directory, and
possibly some directories corresponding to existing containers.

To figure out where your control groups are mounted, you can run:

::

  grep cgroup /proc/mounts

.. _run_findpid:

Enumerating Cgroups
-------------------

You can look into ``/proc/cgroups`` to see the different control group
subsystems known to the system, the hierarchy they belong to, and how
many groups they contain.

You can also look at ``/proc/<pid>/cgroup`` to see which control
groups a process belongs to. The control group will be shown as a path
relative to the root of the hierarchy mountpoint; e.g. ``/`` means
“this process has not been assigned into a particular group”, while
``/lxc/pumpkin`` means that the process is likely to be a member of a
container named ``pumpkin``.

Finding the Cgroup for a Given Container
----------------------------------------

For each container, one cgroup will be created in each hierarchy. On
older systems with older versions of the LXC userland tools, the name
of the cgroup will be the name of the container. With more recent
versions of the LXC tools, the cgroup will be ``lxc/<container_name>.``

For Docker containers using cgroups, the container name will be the
full ID or long ID of the container. If a container shows up as
ae836c95b4c3 in ``docker ps``, its long ID might be something like
``ae836c95b4c3c9e9179e0e91015512da89fdec91612f63cebae57df9a5444c79``. You
can look it up with ``docker inspect`` or ``docker ps --no-trunc``.

Putting everything together to look at the memory metrics for a Docker
container, take a look at ``/sys/fs/cgroup/memory/lxc/<longid>/``.

Metrics from Cgroups: Memory, CPU, Block IO
-------------------------------------------

For each subsystem (memory, CPU, and block I/O), you will find one or
more pseudo-files containing statistics.

Memory Metrics: ``memory.stat``
...............................

Memory metrics are found in the "memory" cgroup. Note that the memory
control group adds a little overhead, because it does very
fine-grained accounting of the memory usage on your host. Therefore,
many distros chose to not enable it by default. Generally, to enable
it, all you have to do is to add some kernel command-line parameters:
``cgroup_enable=memory swapaccount=1``.

The metrics are in the pseudo-file ``memory.stat``. Here is what it
will look like:

::

  cache 11492564992
  rss 1930993664
  mapped_file 306728960
  pgpgin 406632648
  pgpgout 403355412
  swap 0
  pgfault 728281223
  pgmajfault 1724
  inactive_anon 46608384
  active_anon 1884520448
  inactive_file 7003344896
  active_file 4489052160
  unevictable 32768
  hierarchical_memory_limit 9223372036854775807
  hierarchical_memsw_limit 9223372036854775807
  total_cache 11492564992
  total_rss 1930993664
  total_mapped_file 306728960
  total_pgpgin 406632648
  total_pgpgout 403355412
  total_swap 0
  total_pgfault 728281223
  total_pgmajfault 1724
  total_inactive_anon 46608384
  total_active_anon 1884520448
  total_inactive_file 7003344896
  total_active_file 4489052160
  total_unevictable 32768

The first half (without the ``total_`` prefix) contains statistics
relevant to the processes within the cgroup, excluding
sub-cgroups. The second half (with the ``total_`` prefix) includes
sub-cgroups as well.

Some metrics are "gauges", i.e. values that can increase or decrease
(e.g. swap, the amount of swap space used by the members of the
cgroup). Some others are "counters", i.e. values that can only go up,
because they represent occurrences of a specific event (e.g. pgfault,
which indicates the number of page faults which happened since the
creation of the cgroup; this number can never decrease).

cache 
  the amount of memory used by the processes of this control group
  that can be associated precisely with a block on a block
  device. When you read from and write to files on disk, this amount
  will increase. This will be the case if you use "conventional" I/O
  (``open``, ``read``, ``write`` syscalls) as well as mapped files
  (with ``mmap``). It also accounts for the memory used by ``tmpfs``
  mounts, though the reasons are unclear.

rss 
  the amount of memory that *doesn't* correspond to anything on
  disk: stacks, heaps, and anonymous memory maps.

mapped_file 
  indicates the amount of memory mapped by the processes in the
  control group. It doesn't give you information about *how much*
  memory is used; it rather tells you *how* it is used.

pgfault and pgmajfault 
  indicate the number of times that a process of the cgroup triggered
  a "page fault" and a "major fault", respectively. A page fault
  happens when a process accesses a part of its virtual memory space
  which is nonexistent or protected. The former can happen if the
  process is buggy and tries to access an invalid address (it will
  then be sent a ``SIGSEGV`` signal, typically killing it with the
  famous ``Segmentation fault`` message). The latter can happen when
  the process reads from a memory zone which has been swapped out, or
  which corresponds to a mapped file: in that case, the kernel will
  load the page from disk, and let the CPU complete the memory
  access. It can also happen when the process writes to a
  copy-on-write memory zone: likewise, the kernel will preempt the
  process, duplicate the memory page, and resume the write operation
  on the process' own copy of the page. "Major" faults happen when the
  kernel actually has to read the data from disk. When it just has to
  duplicate an existing page, or allocate an empty page, it's a
  regular (or "minor") fault.

swap 
  the amount of swap currently used by the processes in this cgroup.

active_anon and inactive_anon
  the amount of *anonymous* memory that has been identified has
  respectively *active* and *inactive* by the kernel. "Anonymous"
  memory is the memory that is *not* linked to disk pages. In other
  words, that's the equivalent of the rss counter described above. In
  fact, the very definition of the rss counter is **active_anon** +
  **inactive_anon** - **tmpfs** (where tmpfs is the amount of memory
  used up by ``tmpfs`` filesystems mounted by this control
  group). Now, what's the difference between "active" and "inactive"?
  Pages are initially "active"; and at regular intervals, the kernel
  sweeps over the memory, and tags some pages as "inactive". Whenever
  they are accessed again, they are immediately retagged
  "active". When the kernel is almost out of memory, and time comes to
  swap out to disk, the kernel will swap "inactive" pages.

active_file and inactive_file
  cache memory, with *active* and *inactive* similar to the *anon*
  memory above. The exact formula is cache = **active_file** +
  **inactive_file** + **tmpfs**. The exact rules used by the kernel to
  move memory pages between active and inactive sets are different
  from the ones used for anonymous memory, but the general principle
  is the same. Note that when the kernel needs to reclaim memory, it
  is cheaper to reclaim a clean (=non modified) page from this pool,
  since it can be reclaimed immediately (while anonymous pages and
  dirty/modified pages have to be written to disk first).

unevictable
  the amount of memory that cannot be reclaimed; generally, it will
  account for memory that has been "locked" with ``mlock``. It is
  often used by crypto frameworks to make sure that secret keys and
  other sensitive material never gets swapped out to disk.

memory and memsw limits
  These are not really metrics, but a reminder of the limits applied
  to this cgroup. The first one indicates the maximum amount of
  physical memory that can be used by the processes of this control
  group; the second one indicates the maximum amount of RAM+swap.

Accounting for memory in the page cache is very complex. If two
processes in different control groups both read the same file
(ultimately relying on the same blocks on disk), the corresponding
memory charge will be split between the control groups. It's nice, but
it also means that when a cgroup is terminated, it could increase the
memory usage of another cgroup, because they are not splitting the
cost anymore for those memory pages.

CPU metrics: ``cpuacct.stat``
.............................

Now that we've covered memory metrics, everything else will look very
simple in comparison. CPU metrics will be found in the ``cpuacct``
controller.

For each container, you will find a pseudo-file ``cpuacct.stat``,
containing the CPU usage accumulated by the processes of the
container, broken down between ``user`` and ``system`` time. If you're
not familiar with the distinction, ``user`` is the time during which
the processes were in direct control of the CPU (i.e. executing
process code), and ``system`` is the time during which the CPU was
executing system calls on behalf of those processes.

Those times are expressed in ticks of 1/100th of a second. Actually,
they are expressed in "user jiffies". There are ``USER_HZ``
*"jiffies"* per second, and on x86 systems, ``USER_HZ`` is 100. This
used to map exactly to the number of scheduler "ticks" per second; but
with the advent of higher frequency scheduling, as well as `tickless
kernels <http://lwn.net/Articles/549580/>`_, the number of kernel
ticks wasn't relevant anymore. It stuck around anyway, mainly for
legacy and compatibility reasons.

Block I/O metrics
.................

Block I/O is accounted in the ``blkio`` controller. Different metrics
are scattered across different files. While you can find in-depth
details in the `blkio-controller
<https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cgroups/blkio-controller.txt>`_
file in the kernel documentation, here is a short list of the most
relevant ones:

blkio.sectors 
  contain the number of 512-bytes sectors read and written by the
  processes member of the cgroup, device by device. Reads and writes
  are merged in a single counter.

blkio.io_service_bytes 
  indicates the number of bytes read and written by the cgroup. It has
  4 counters per device, because for each device, it differentiates
  between synchronous vs. asynchronous I/O, and reads vs. writes.

blkio.io_serviced
  the number of I/O operations performed, regardless of their size. It
  also has 4 counters per device.

blkio.io_queued 
  indicates the number of I/O operations currently queued for this
  cgroup. In other words, if the cgroup isn't doing any I/O, this will
  be zero. Note that the opposite is not true. In other words, if
  there is no I/O queued, it does not mean that the cgroup is idle
  (I/O-wise). It could be doing purely synchronous reads on an
  otherwise quiescent device, which is therefore able to handle them
  immediately, without queuing. Also, while it is helpful to figure
  out which cgroup is putting stress on the I/O subsystem, keep in
  mind that is is a relative quantity. Even if a process group does
  not perform more I/O, its queue size can increase just because the
  device load increases because of other devices.

Network Metrics
---------------

Network metrics are not exposed directly by control groups. There is a
good explanation for that: network interfaces exist within the context
of *network namespaces*. The kernel could probably accumulate metrics
about packets and bytes sent and received by a group of processes, but
those metrics wouldn't be very useful. You want per-interface metrics
(because traffic happening on the local ``lo`` interface doesn't
really count). But since processes in a single cgroup can belong to
multiple network namespaces, those metrics would be harder to
interpret: multiple network namespaces means multiple ``lo``
interfaces, potentially multiple ``eth0`` interfaces, etc.; so this is
why there is no easy way to gather network metrics with control
groups.

Instead we can gather network metrics from other sources:

IPtables
........

IPtables (or rather, the netfilter framework for which iptables is
just an interface) can do some serious accounting.

For instance, you can setup a rule to account for the outbound HTTP
traffic on a web server:

::

  iptables -I OUTPUT -p tcp --sport 80


There is no ``-j`` or ``-g`` flag, so the rule will just count matched
packets and go to the following rule.

Later, you can check the values of the counters, with:

::

   iptables -nxvL OUTPUT

Technically, ``-n`` is not required, but it will prevent iptables from
doing DNS reverse lookups, which are probably useless in this
scenario.

Counters include packets and bytes. If you want to setup metrics for
container traffic like this, you could execute a ``for`` loop to add
two ``iptables`` rules per container IP address (one in each
direction), in the ``FORWARD`` chain. This will only meter traffic
going through the NAT layer; you will also have to add traffic going
through the userland proxy.

Then, you will need to check those counters on a regular basis. If you
happen to use ``collectd``, there is a nice plugin to automate
iptables counters collection.

Interface-level counters
........................

Since each container has a virtual Ethernet interface, you might want
to check directly the TX and RX counters of this interface. You will
notice that each container is associated to a virtual Ethernet
interface in your host, with a name like ``vethKk8Zqi``. Figuring out
which interface corresponds to which container is, unfortunately,
difficult.

But for now, the best way is to check the metrics *from within the
containers*. To accomplish this, you can run an executable from the
host environment within the network namespace of a container using
**ip-netns magic**.

The ``ip-netns exec`` command will let you execute any program
(present in the host system) within any network namespace visible to
the current process. This means that your host will be able to enter
the network namespace of your containers, but your containers won't be
able to access the host, nor their sibling containers. Containers will
be able to “see” and affect their sub-containers, though.

The exact format of the command is::

  ip netns exec <nsname> <command...>

For example::

  ip netns exec mycontainer netstat -i

``ip netns`` finds the "mycontainer" container by using namespaces
pseudo-files. Each process belongs to one network namespace, one PID
namespace, one ``mnt`` namespace, etc., and those namespaces are
materialized under ``/proc/<pid>/ns/``. For example, the network
namespace of PID 42 is materialized by the pseudo-file
``/proc/42/ns/net``.

When you run ``ip netns exec mycontainer ...``, it expects
``/var/run/netns/mycontainer`` to be one of those
pseudo-files. (Symlinks are accepted.)

In other words, to execute a command within the network namespace of a
container, we need to:

* Find out the PID of any process within the container that we want to
  investigate;
* Create a symlink from ``/var/run/netns/<somename>`` to
  ``/proc/<thepid>/ns/net``
* Execute ``ip netns exec <somename> ....``

Please review :ref:`run_findpid` to learn how to find the cgroup of a
pprocess running in the container of which you want to measure network
usage. From there, you can examine the pseudo-file named ``tasks``,
which containes the PIDs that are in the control group (i.e. in the
container). Pick any one of them.

Putting everything together, if the "short ID" of a container is held
in the environment variable ``$CID``, then you can do this::

  TASKS=/sys/fs/cgroup/devices/$CID*/tasks
  PID=$(head -n 1 $TASKS)
  mkdir -p /var/run/netns
  ln -sf /proc/$PID/ns/net /var/run/netns/$CID
  ip netns exec $CID netstat -i


Tips for high-performance metric collection
-------------------------------------------

Note that running a new process each time you want to update metrics
is (relatively) expensive. If you want to collect metrics at high
resolutions, and/or over a large number of containers (think 1000
containers on a single host), you do not want to fork a new process
each time.

Here is how to collect metrics from a single process. You will have to
write your metric collector in C (or any language that lets you do
low-level system calls). You need to use a special system call,
``setns()``, which lets the current process enter any arbitrary
namespace. It requires, however, an open file descriptor to the
namespace pseudo-file (remember: that’s the pseudo-file in
``/proc/<pid>/ns/net``).

However, there is a catch: you must not keep this file descriptor
open. If you do, when the last process of the control group exits, the
namespace will not be destroyed, and its network resources (like the
virtual interface of the container) will stay around for ever (or
until you close that file descriptor).

The right approach would be to keep track of the first PID of each
container, and re-open the namespace pseudo-file each time.

Collecting metrics when a container exits 
-----------------------------------------

Sometimes, you do not care about real time metric collection, but when
a container exits, you want to know how much CPU, memory, etc. it has
used.

Docker makes this difficult because it relies on ``lxc-start``, which
carefully cleans up after itself, but it is still possible. It is
usually easier to collect metrics at regular intervals (e.g. every
minute, with the collectd LXC plugin) and rely on that instead.

But, if you'd still like to gather the stats when a container stops,
here is how:

For each container, start a collection process, and move it to the
control groups that you want to monitor by writing its PID to the
tasks file of the cgroup. The collection process should periodically
re-read the tasks file to check if it's the last process of the
control group. (If you also want to collect network statistics as
explained in the previous section, you should also move the process to
the appropriate network namespace.)

When the container exits, ``lxc-start`` will try to delete the control
groups. It will fail, since the control group is still in use; but
that’s fine. You process should now detect that it is the only one
remaining in the group. Now is the right time to collect all the
metrics you need!

Finally, your process should move itself back to the root control
group, and remove the container control group. To remove a control
group, just ``rmdir`` its directory. It's counter-intuitive to
``rmdir`` a directory as it still contains files; but remember that
this is a pseudo-filesystem, so usual rules don't apply. After the
cleanup is done, the collection process can exit safely.

