A visual representation facilitates understanding any complex system design. Running micro-services on a cluster is no exception. Since I am involved in running and operating containers in Docker swarm cluster, I often wonder how better I could be on top of the container tasks distribution is taking place at any given moment, their health, the health of the machine underneath etc. I have found the docker-swarm-visualizer in GitHub – which does a nice job in visualizing the nodes and tasks graphically. But I was thriving to associate a little more information (i.e. image, ports, node’s IP address etc.) to the visualization. Which could help me take the follow up actions as needed. Which led me writing a swarm visualizer that does fulfil my wishes.
Here’s video glimpse for inspirations.
Well, that’s one little excuse of mine. Of course writing a visualizer is always a fun activity for me. The objective of the visualizer was following:
- Run the visualizer as a container into the swarm
- Real time updates when nodes added, removed, drained, failed etc.
- Real time updates when services created, updated, replications changed.
- Real time updates when task added, removed etc.
- Display task images, tags to track versions (when rolling updates take place)
- Display IP address and ports for nodes – (helps troubleshooting)
How to run
To get the visualizer up and running in your cluster
> docker run -p 9009:9009 -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock moimhossain/viswarm
How to develop
This is what you need to do in order to start hacking the codebase
> npm install
It might be the case that you have installed webpack locally and received a webpack command not recognized error. In such scenarios, you can either install webpack globally or run it from local installation by using the following command:
node_modules\.bin\webpack
Start the development server (changes will now update live in browser)
> npm run dev
To view your project, go to: http://localhost:9009/
Some of the wishes I am working on:
- Stop tasks from the user interface
- Update service definitions from user interface
- Leave, drain a node from the user interface
- Alert on crucial events like node drain, service down etc.
The application written with Express 4 on Node JS. React-Redux for user interface. Docker Remote API’s are sitting behind proxy with a Node API on top, which better prevents exposing Docker API – when IPv6 used.
If you are playing with Docker swarm clusters and reading this, I insist, give it a go, you might like it as well. And of course, it’s in GitHub, waiting for helping hands to take to the next level.
