Documentation forSolarWinds Platform Self-Hosted

Container monitoring requirements

This topic applies only to the following products:

SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted

SAM — VMAN

Starting in Orion Platform 2020.2.6, use SolarWinds Tokens for container monitoring. Update any container services added in earlier versions. Otherwise, polling stops.

Requirements
SolarWinds Platform product

If FIPS mode or High Availability (HA) is enabled, you cannot add container services. Remove existing container data and delete container services. Otherwise, container polling will continue but metrics are not saved.

IPv6-enabled environments are not supported for monitoring of Docker, Docker Swarm, or Apache Mesos containers.
Supported container services
  • Docker
  • Docker Swarm 17.12 and later
  • Kubernetes (K8s) 1.16-1.22, 1.23 and later, including Microsoft Azure Kubernetes (AKS)
  • Apache Mesos
Host servers

For Docker, Docker Swarm, and Mesos, add each Linux server that hosts containers as a managed node using ICMP as the Polling Method. See Add a container service.

To monitor all containers in a single cluster, add each server from the cluster as a separate Orion node.

For Kubernetes or AKS, add the Kubernetes API server as a managed Orion node.

Each managed Orion node that hosts one or more containers consumes a license.

Monitored Docker, Kubernetes, and Docker Swarm hosts need a working connection to Docker Hub.
Software

An SSH connection to the host server

Need an SSH client? Try the free SolarWinds Solar-PuTTY tool.
Ports
Port Protocol Service/Process Direction Description
38012 TCP

Container Monitoring

Bidirectional Communication between the SolarWinds Platform Business Layer and container environments

Container vendor-specific third-party ports

Docker and Docker Swarm ports

Port Protocol Service/Process Direction Description
4043 TCP Internal Docker communication Local Container port
6784 TCP Internal Docker communication Local Report/wave status

Kubernetes (K8s) and Microsoft Azure Kubernetes (AKS)

Port Protocol Service/Process Direction Description
4043 TCP Internal K8s communication Local Target port/Container port
10250 TCP Internal K8s communication Local Listening port for Kubelet agent
30043 TCP Internal K8s communication Local Node port

Apache Mesos

Port Protocol Service/Process Direction Description
4043 TCP Internal Mesos communication Local Mesos master server port
8080 TCP Internal Mesos communication Local Deployment service
Permissions

An Orion Administrator account is required to manage container services.

Use SolarWinds Tokens as SolarWinds Platform credentials for container services.

If upgrading from an earlier versions, update existing container services to use tokens. Otherwise, polling stops.

Sudo privileges are required on Linux host servers.

To learn about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) permissions, see:

Environment-specific requirements

Each container environment has specific requirements, as described in the following topics: 

SolarWinds documentation describes how to display container data in the SolarWinds Platform Web Console. To manipulate containers directly, refer to third-party vendor documentation. For example, to learn about swarm mode, see Docker docs.