Documentation forSolarWinds Platform

Container monitoring requirements

This SolarWinds Platform topic applies only to the following products:

Hybrid Cloud Observability Essentials — Hybrid Cloud Observability Advanced

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.
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

In Orion Platform 2020.2.6 and later, open port 38012 to support communication between the Orion Business Layer and container environments. Ports 17778 and 17799 are no longer needed.

Environment-specific ports include:

  • Docker and Docker Swarm:
    • 80: Used to download the configuration file from the SolarWinds Platform server.
    • 4043: Container port (internal Docker communication)
    • 6784: Report/wave status (internal Docker communication)
  • Kubernetes (K8s), including AKS:
    • 4043: Target port/Container port (internal K8s communication)
    • 10250: Listening port for Kubelet agent
    • 30043: Node port (internal K8s communication)
  • Apache Mesos:
    • 4043: Mesos master server port (internal Mesos communication)
    • 8080: Deployment service (internal Mesos communication)
Permissions

An Orion Administrator account is required to manage container services.

Starting in SAM and VMAN 2020.2.6, use a new type of SolarWinds Platform credential for container services: SolarWinds Tokens.

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:

© 2021 Microsoft Corp., available at docs.microsoft.com, obtained on June, 2021

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 (© 2021 Docker, Inc., available at docs.docker.com, obtained on June 14, 2021.)