The Docker Collection Agent runs one OpenTelemetry Collector container on each Docker host. It collects metrics and logs from the host and its containers, receives telemetry from your instrumented applications, and sends everything to SigNoz.
The Docker Collection Agent primarily performs the following:
- Collects host metrics such as CPU, memory, disk, filesystem, and network usage from the Docker host.
- Collects resource usage metrics for each container from the Docker Engine.
- Tails and parses the logs of the containers on the host and sends them to SigNoz.
- Acts as a gateway to send traces, metrics, and logs from your applications to SigNoz.
How it works
Agent (container)
The agent reads the host through read-only mounts of the host's root filesystem and Docker's container log directory, and the Docker Engine API through the Docker socket. It collects host-level and container-level data:
- Host metrics: CPU usage, memory consumption, disk I/O, filesystem usage, network statistics, and load averages from the Docker host.
- Container metrics: CPU, memory, network, and block I/O usage of each container, from the Docker Engine API.
- Container logs: Tailing and parsing the logs of the containers on the host. Each log record carries the
container.idresource attribute. - OTLP: Traces, metrics, and logs from instrumented applications, over OTLP/gRPC (4317) and OTLP/HTTP (4318).
- Resource attributes:
host.nameon every signal, and on AWS, GCP, and Azure virtual machines the cloud provider, region, and instance.
The agent runs on the host's network, so its host metrics and host.name describe the Docker host itself.
