The Essential Guide To Monitoring Containers And Microservices

The Essential Guide to Monitoring Containers and Microservices explores the profound changes cloud-native development has brought to application performance monitoring (APM). As monolithic applications give way to microservices deployed in containers, traditional monitoring tools struggle to keep up with the demands of hyper-distributed, short-lived, and rapidly scaling environments.

The guide outlines the five core requirements for modern APM tools:

Second-by-second metrics – Monitoring must match the short-lived nature of containers.

AI and machine learning – These technologies are essential to identify patterns and anomalies at scale.

Unified performance monitoring – A single pane of glass for apps, infrastructure, and networks.

Dynamic dependency mapping – Real-time visibility into how microservices interact.

End-user experience monitoring – Understanding how backend complexity impacts customer satisfaction.

It highlights the role of orchestration tools like Kubernetes, the need for network-aware monitoring, and the increasing reliance on big data analytics to extract insights from high-velocity telemetry streams. The guide concludes with Riverbed’s vision for tackling these challenges without resorting to sampling, emphasizing full fidelity data collection and AI-driven insights.