While Grafana gives us a great start to monitoring our container operations, it is still a work in progress. In the real world of operations, having a complete dashboard view is great once we know there is a problem. However, in everyday scenarios, we'd prefer to be proactive and actually receive notifications when issues arise. This kind of alerting capability is a must to keep the operations team ahead of the curve and out of reactive mode.

There are many solutions available in this space, and we will take a look at two in particular: GCE monitoring (Stackdriver) and Sysdig.