Beats and Docker autodiscover - only works with container start/stop

[sgreszcz (Stephen Greszczyszyn)]

Quick question about the filebeat and metricbeat "autodiscover" feature for Docker. Does this work with "static" containers, or does metric/log collection from within the docker container only begin if the beats notice a "start" trigger via the Docker API.

The reason I'm asking is that I have some static containers (such as elasticsearch itself in Docker) that only start if the Ubuntu server is started/rebooted. I'm not sure if the "autodiscover" feature will find containers that are already started when the beats container is started.

I guess a work-around would be to start the filebeat and metricbeat container before the reset of the application containers...

[andrewkroh]

Yes, this will work. It lists the running containers when it starts up. Then after that it uses the docker events stream to observe the starts and stops.

[andrewkroh]

Documentation update: https://github.com/elastic/beats/pull/7468

[sgreszcz (Stephen Greszczyszyn)]

Hey thanks so much for this clarification. I'm going to experiment with autodiscover on filebeats/metricbeats today to simplify the docker monitoring.