This chapter looked at troubleshooting applications running in containers, along with debugging and instrumentation. Docker is a new application platform, but applications in containers run as processes on the host, so they're still suitable targets for remote debugging and centralized monitoring.

Support for Docker is available in all the current versions of Visual Studio. Visual Studio 2017 has the most complete support, covering Linux and Windows containers. Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio Code currently have extensions that provide debugging for Linux containers. You can easily add your own support for Windows containers, but the full debugging experience is still evolving.

In this chapter, I also introduced Prometheus, a lightweight instrumentation and monitoring component that you can run in a Windows Docker container. Prometheus stores the metrics it extracts from applications running on other containers. The standardized nature of containers makes monitoring solutions such as these very simple to configure. I used Prometheus data to drive a dashboards in Grafana, running in a container, which is a simple and powerful way of presenting a consolidated view of the health of your application.

The next chapter is the final chapter of this book. I'll end by sharing some approaches to get started with Docker in your own domain, including case studies where I have used Docker on Windows for existing projects.