Real-Time Docker Metrics with AWS CloudWatch: Dynamic Integration for Containers

Naveen Pandava

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May 13, 2025

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Monitoring Docker containers is crucial for maintaining performance, diagnosing issues, and ensuring resource utilization is optimized. While AWS CloudWatch offers robust monitoring capabilities, out-of-the-box Docker doesn’t automatically send its resource metrics (like CPU, memory, I/O) to CloudWatch.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to dynamically send Docker container metrics — gathered using docker stats — to AWS CloudWatch Metrics automatically every time a container starts.

🧠 Why Send Docker Stats to CloudWatch?

By pushing container-level stats to CloudWatch:

• You can visualize resource usage per container in the AWS Console.
• Create alarms and notifications for high CPU, memory usage, or container crashes.
• Get centralized, long-term metrics storage even for short-lived containers.

🔧 What You’ll Build

You’ll implement a setup where:

• Each time a Docker container starts, a background process (or sidecar) collects its stats.
• The stats are parsed and pushed to AWS CloudWatch Metrics using the AWS CLI or SDK.