Fluentd VS cadvisor

Get Started with Fluentd

Currently, there is no cluster-wide logging. Fluentd can be used to have a unified logging layer for the cluster.

Fluentd hasn't been touched for 8 years? Looking at the repo it looks like it's alive and well. https://github.com/fluent/fluentd

Fluentd is an open-source log management and data collection tool. Just like Logstash, Fluentd uses a pipeline-based architecture. This allows it to collect data from various sources and network traffic and forward it to various destinations.

Fluentd is a powerful log management tool that offers organizations the flexibility and scalability required to handle large volumes of log data from a variety of sources and transport it to various destinations. Utilizing a flexible and modular architecture, Fluentd allows users to easily add new input and output plugins to integrate with a wide range of systems and applications. It supports a wide range of data sources and destinations, including databases, message queues, and data stores.

Substation is an affordable alternative to products like Cribl (~10x cost savings) and is easier to manage than similar open-source projects such as Logstash and fluentd. It's been used in production by the security team at Brex for 2+ years and is ready for any scale, even beyond 100,000 events per second!

There are probably too many to chose from. Logstash, Promtail, Vector, Filebeat, FluentD, Logagent and probably many more

To alleviate some of the pain, it’s a good idea to use industry standards and tooling like OpenTelemetry (https://opentelemetry.io). For data collection specific to logs, open-source tools like LogStash and Fluentd are also popular.

Created and maintained by the creators of fluentd, fluentbit is a lightweight, fast, and scalable logging and metrics processor and forwarder. Built specifically for the cloud and containerized environments, it allows users to collect data from any source, enrich it with filters and forward it to the tool of their choice.

cAdvisor

https://github.com/google/cadvisor exports Prometheus metrics, but also offers a simple web-ui for container metrics.

version: '3' volumes: prometheus-data: driver: local grafana-data: driver: local services: prometheus: image: prom/prometheus:latest container_name: prometheus ports: - "9090:9090" volumes: - /etc/prometheus:/etc/prometheus - prometheus-data:/prometheus restart: unless-stopped command: - "--config.file=/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml" grafana: image: grafana/grafana:latest container_name: grafana ports: - "3000:3000" volumes: - grafana-data:/var/lib/grafana restart: unless-stopped node_exporter: image: quay.io/prometheus/node-exporter:latest container_name: node_exporter command: - '--path.rootfs=/host' pid: host restart: unless-stopped volumes: - '/:/host:ro,rslave' cadvisor: # TODO: latest tag is not updated, check latest release https://github.com/google/cadvisor/releases image: gcr.io/cadvisor/cadvisor-arm:v0.47.0 container_name: cadvisor ports: - "8080:8080" network_mode: host volumes: - /:/rootfs:ro - /var/run:/var/run:ro - /sys:/sys:ro - /var/lib/docker/:/var/lib/docker:ro - /dev/disk/:/dev/disk:ro privileged: true restart: unless-stopped depends_on: - redis redis: image: redis:latest container_name: redis ports: - "6379:6379"

For CPU and memory metrics, you can use cAdvisor to collect container level data.

Perhaps https://github.com/google/cadvisor + prometheus (or influx or whatever else) + grafana?

We could have used a much more focussed tool like Prometheus or Cadvisor to gather system stats, but that is not the main objective of this article.

Result: Interestingly, the GitHub Issue that talks about cAdvisor and Docker Desktop for Mac for running cAdvisor is still open and not fixed.

If you're running things under systemd, you can enable process accounting and use cAdvisor.

Check this thread if you’re having difficulties, but it might run out of the box these days: https://github.com/google/cadvisor/issues/1846