How to configure Docker integration with Prometheus and Grafana monitoring systems for collecting container metrics?

Monitoring the health of containerized applications is a critical aspect of operating modern infrastructure. Out of the box, Docker provides a built-in daemon with support for collecting performance metrics, which can be configured to export data in a format compatible with popular statistics-gathering systems.

To enable this feature, you need to edit the Docker daemon configuration file and specify the parameters to activate the metrics endpoint. After applying the settings and restarting the daemon service, system metrics for CPU, memory, and disk usage will become available for scraping via a dedicated network port.

The next step is to configure the metrics collection system to periodically scrape the Docker daemon endpoint, as well as the containers themselves if they expose application performance statistics. This allows combining host system metrics and service business metrics into a single visualization interface.

A dashboarding tool is traditionally used as the visualizer, connecting to the metrics database as a data source. Ready-made dashboard templates for Docker monitoring allow you to quickly deploy attractive resource utilization charts and set up alerts for critical infrastructure states.