If you're a Windows admin and you haven't heard of Windows Admin Center, you're absolutely missing on the awesome cool new way to manage your servers - so for this blog post, I'll assume you're familiar with it. If you're not, take a moment to review the link above.
What many people managing Windows Admin Center don't know is that there is a Containers extension available:
Once you install the extension, you can target your container hosts:
The Summary page gives you an overview on how your container host is operating, how many containers you have running in that host, etc. However, Windows Admin Center can do much more...
Using Windows Admin Center to troubleshoot containers
When clicking the Containers tab inside the Containers extension, you get more details of your running containers:
In the example above, you can note a few things:
- On the container list, Windows Admin Center gives you the port configuration for that container. This is particularly helpful to troubleshoot cases where you have a container that is not responding correctly to TCP calls. In this example, you can see port 80 is open in the container but mapped to port 8080 on the host.
- On the bottom pane, you get a nice visualization of how your container is performing. In case your application is consuming too much memory, compute, or networking you can quickly identify that and take an action.
However the thing I like the most here is the ability to see the events from inside the container:
Windows Admin Center can do more. You can check the container images you have stored, the networking configuration, and volumes available for your containers. In future blog posts we'll look into some of these configurations.
We need your feedback
We have some amazing ideas on how to improve the Containers extension for Windows Admin Center, but we'd like to hear from you! If you have an idea, found a bug, or something you'd like us to look into, please let us know either in this blog post or on our User Voice page.