Part 15 — How I Run My Entire Digital Life on a Raspberry Pi: Monitor the Monitors — Real-Time Docker Metrics with cAdvisor
Ever wondered what’s really happening inside your Docker containers? Imagine having a crystal-clear, real-time dashboard showing exactly how much CPU, memory, disk, and network your apps are using — without any guesswork or manual digging. That’s where cAdvisor (short for Container Advisor) steps in, and it does so with the pedigree of Google’s own infrastructure.
Built and battle-tested by the engineers who keep services like Gmail and YouTube running at global scale, cAdvisor is your secret weapon for container visibility. It automatically discovers every running container on your host, collects a rich stream of performance and resource metrics, and exposes them via a slick web UI and a powerful API. What makes cAdvisor especially exciting? It’s lightweight, requires zero changes to your containers, and plugs seamlessly into monitoring stacks like Prometheus and Grafana for beautiful, actionable dashboards. From CPU spikes to memory leaks, from network bottlenecks to disk thrashing — cAdvisor tracks it all, live and in detail.