Operations Management Suite (OMS)

The Microsoft Operations Management suite offers similar Docker-related functionality to Application Insights. It collects all the necessary log data and offers a nice UI in a standalone portal that enables users to drill into all the components of a containerized microservices architecture, such as Docker host VMs in an environment, images, and containers.

So what is the difference? Application Insights is targeting container monitoring with an option to gain additional application-level telemetry on Azure, so it is really all about the developer experience. OMS, on the other hand, is an all-in-one cloud management solution that targets public clouds such as Azure, AWS, OpenStack, and so on, as well as hybrid clouds, and is all about the management aspects of containers rather than just monitoring.

OMS offers two ways of installing and enabling its agent on host VMs.

• The agent is available as a download on MSDN and GitHub. As it is a standalone agent, we could use Puppet, Chef, or Azure Resource Manager to install and configure the agent as part of our environment-provisioning step.

• Pull the OMS agent image from Docker Hub.

As mentioned before, the Docker monitoring functionality is very similar to what Application Insights offers. We get all the monitoring data relevant to the containers, such as:

• Number of container host VMs and their utilization

• Number of running containers

• Container and image inventory

• Container performance and container logs

• Docker daemon logs

In addition to the data, OMS will also associate the application logs with relevant container information if the application logs to STDOUT/STDERR.

In addition to its Docker integration, OMS is a great solution if we have to manage resources across various clouds as it enables people to have one single portal to monitor and manage those resources.