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Summary
This article lists the Azure Container Instances (ACI) debugging tools that you can use to monitor container health, analyze logs and events, and troubleshoot application and container failures.
List of debugging tools
The following table summarizes the debugging features available for ACI.
| Feature | Use case | Example |
|---|---|---|
| High availability and resilience | Ensuring that your containers are always available and resilient to failures | Deploying a web application that has multiple instances of containers behind a load balancer. The liveness probe checks whether each container is responsive. If a container becomes unresponsive, ACI automatically restarts the container to maintain high availability. |
| Health monitoring and autorecovery | Monitoring the health of your containers and automatically recovering from failures | Running a microservice that processes messages from a queue. The liveness probe verifies that the container can handle requests. If the service becomes unhealthy (for example, because of memory exhaustion or a deadlock), ACI restarts the container to restore service. |
| Graceful shutdown and cleanup | Ensuring that containers shut down gracefully during scaling events or maintenance | Allowing existing requests to finish before terminating the container while scaling down a service. This action prevents data loss or incomplete transactions. |
| Custom health checks | Implementing custom health checks that are specific to your application | A container that's running a database server using a liveness probe that connects to the database and verifies its responsiveness. If the database becomes unresponsive, ACI can restart the container or trigger an alert. |
| Handling initialization failures | Detecting whether the container initializes correctly after startup | Checking whether the required dependencies are available before the container starts accepting traffic in ACI. |
Make sure to configure a liveness probe for your containers. A liveness probe checks whether a container is running and responding within a specified interval.
Also, be sure to check container logging and events.
To store and query the logging and event data, use a centralized location, such as a Log Analytics workspace.
The following table summarizes the troubleshooting features available for ACI.
| Feature | Use case | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Troubleshooting application errors | Identifying and diagnosing application errors or crashes that occur within the container (if application logging is configured) | Analyzing container logs to pinpoint the source of a "500 Internal Server Error" event that's reported by the application. |
| Troubleshooting container events | Detecting container creation failures | Analyzing an event that displays the details of a container not starting because of an image pull failure. |
Note
Some log entries might be missing if the container is restarted or recreated as soon as container process exits.
Use Application Insights to monitor and analyze the performance and health of your applications running in ACI.
Use the "ping -t" or "tail -f /dev/null" command during container creation (if the container continually exists and restarts) to keep the container running for troubleshooting purposes.
The following table lists commands that are run within a running container.
| Feature | Use case | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Command execution | Running commands for troubleshooting inside a container | Accessing the container's Bash shell to investigate application errors and diagnose issues interactively. |
| Troubleshooting performance | Running performance commands to diagnose issues | Running the free command in the container to identify memory bottlenecks that cause application slowdowns. |
The container group updating feature allows you to modify the configuration of an existing container group without having to delete and recreate it.