cAdvisor is a container monitoring daemon that analyzes resource usage and performance characteristics of running containers.
cAdvisor addresses the need to understand how containers consume system resources by running as a daemon that collects, aggregates, and exports detailed metrics about each container. For every running container, it tracks resource isolation parameters, historical resource usage with complete histograms, and network statistics, making this data available both at the container level and across the entire machine. The tool has native support for Docker containers and uses a hierarchical container abstraction based on lmctfy, allowing it to represent nested container relationships.
cAdvisor suits operators and platform teams who need visibility into container resource consumption across their infrastructure. It works well in both standalone deployments and as a Kubernetes daemonset, and it can export metrics to various storage backends for integration with monitoring systems. The tool exposes its data through a web UI, a versioned REST API, and an official Go client, making it flexible for different integration patterns.
The project maintains a substantial base of real-world adopters, as evidenced by the fact that almost all open issues are raised by outside users rather than the core team. Responses to issues and pull requests typically arrive within one to two weeks. Work in the issue tracker is dominated by support requests, enhancement proposals, and bug reports.
