Portainer for visualizing your docker infra

So after having played around with shipyard  I decided to give Portainer a try . The reason why I wanted to look at Portainer as it gives you much more information around your Docker infra than shipyard does.

Below is a screenshot showing the features within shipyard:

You can see that it has information around containers , images , nodes and registries and that pretty much stops there.

In comparison Portainer provides much more level of details :

The thing that interested the most was the Networks section as I was trying to figure out how to connect a docker-compose tiggered container with a shared container which was not launched through docker-compose.

Installation Portainer :

- You need as pre-requiste to have docker and  docker swarm installed
- Official installation instructions are here 
- Then just execute the following command to install the Portainer container ,which will be exposed on port 9000 :

docker run -d -p 9000:9000 portainer/portainer

Note that am assuming that your running on ubuntu /linux

To run portainer on a local instance of the docker engine use the following command :

docker run -d -p 9000:9000  -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock portainer/portainer

Endpoints

You an have multiple endpoints configured such as you are monitoring diferent remote instances :
- make sure that inbound ports are opened on your remote endpoints (e.g 2375 )
- if you run Portainer locally to your docker containers , there is a recommended setting to be changed or just provide the public ip addr. of the docker host