Combining Grafana and cAdvisor (Container Advisor) is the standard open-source recipe for monitoring Docker and Kubernetes container metrics (like CPU, memory, network, and disk usage).

Because cAdvisor only keeps a tiny buffer of real-time data in memory, you need a time-series database (almost always Prometheus or Grafana Alloy) to scrape that data and hand it off to Grafana for visualization.

Here is a breakdown of how the architecture works, how to set it up, and how to get a dashboard running.

The Monitoring Pipeline

1. cAdvisor: Sits on the host machine, hooks into the Linux kernel cgroups, and collects resource usage from all running containers. It exposes these raw numbers at a /metrics endpoint.
2. Prometheus: Periodically “scrapes” (pulls) the data from cAdvisor’s /metrics endpoint and stores it as historical time-series data.
3. Grafana: Queries Prometheus using PromQL and plots the data onto clean, interactive dashboards.

Quick Setup: Docker Compose Example

The easiest way to spin up cAdvisor, Prometheus, and Grafana all at once to monitor your local Docker containers is by using a docker-compose.yml file.

YAML

version: '3.8'
services:
  cadvisor:
    image: gcr.io/cadvisor/cadvisor:latest
    container_name: cadvisor
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    volumes:
      - /:/rootfs:ro
      - /var/run:/var/run:ro
      - /sys:/sys:ro
      - /var/lib/docker/:/var/lib/docker:ro
      - /dev/disk/:/dev/disk:ro
    devices:
      - /dev/kmsg
    restart: unless-stopped
  prometheus:
    image: prom/prometheus:latest
    container_name: prometheus
    ports:
      - "9090:9090"
    volumes:
      - ./prometheus.yml:/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml
    restart: unless-stopped
  grafana:
    image: grafana/grafana:latest
    container_name: grafana
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    restart: unless-stopped

The Prometheus Config (prometheus.yml)

To tell Prometheus to scrape your cAdvisor container, create a prometheus.yml file in the same directory:

YAML

global:
  scrape_interval: 15s
scrape_configs:
  - job_name: 'cadvisor'
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['cadvisor:8080']

Run docker compose up -d, and your basic infrastructure is live!

Visualizing with Grafana Dashboards

Instead of building your container monitoring dashboards from scratch, you can import highly optimized community templates.

Recommended Pre-built Dashboards

1. Log into your Grafana instance (usually http://localhost:3000 — default credentials are admin / admin).
2. Add Prometheus as your data source (Connections > Data sources > Add data source).
3. Go to Dashboards > New > Import.
4. Paste one of these popular community Dashboard IDs:
   • 19908 (cAdvisor Docker Insights – clean, official-feeling modern dashboard)
   • 14282 (Cadvisor Exporter – great for focused container-by-container metrics)
   • 19792 (Advanced cAdvisor dashboard with support for Docker Compose projects)

Key cAdvisor Metrics to Know

When creating your own panels or alerts, look out for these fundamental metric names:

• CPU Usage: container_cpu_usage_seconds_total (usually paired with rate() to calculate CPU percentage like sum(rate(container_cpu_usage_seconds_total[5m])) by (name))
• Memory Usage: container_memory_usage_bytes (tells you the exact RAM consumption)
• Network Traffic: container_network_receive_bytes_total and container_network_transmit_bytes_total
• Disk I/O: container_fs_reads_bytes_total and container_fs_writes_bytes_total