Monitor your cluster

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

This article gives you an overview of how to monitor your Docker UCP.

Check the cluster status from the UI

To monitor your UCP cluster, the first thing to check is the Nodes screen on the UCP web app.

UCP dashboard

In the nodes screen you can see if all the nodes in the cluster are healthy, or if there is any problem.

If you’re an administrator you can also check the state and logs of the UCP internal services.

To check the state of the ucp-agent service, navigate to the Services page and toggle the Show system services option.

The ucp-agent service monitors the node where it is running, deploys other UCP internal components, and ensures they keep running. The UCP components that are deployed on a node, depend on whether the node is a manager or worker. Learn more about the UCP architecture

To check the state and logs of other UCP internal components, go to the Containers page, and appply the System containers filter. This can help validate that all UCP internal components are up and running.

It’s normal for the ucp-reconcile to be stopped. This container only runs when the ucp-agent detects that a UCP internal component should be running but for some reason it’s not. In this case the ucp-agent starts the ucp-reconcile service to start all UCP services that need to be running. Once that is done, the ucp-agent stops.

Check the cluster status from the CLI

You can also monitor the status of a UCP cluster using the Docker CLI client. There are two ways to do this, using a client certificate bundle, or logging into one of the manager nodes using ssh.

Then you can use regular Docker CLI commands to check the status and logs of the UCP internal services and containers.

Automated status checking

You can use the https://<ucp-url>/_ping endpoint to perform automated monitoring tasks. When you access this endpoint, UCP validates that all its internal components are working, and returns the following HTTP error codes:

  • 200, if all components are healthy
  • 500, if one or more components are not healthy

If you’re accessing this endpoint through a load balancer, you’ll have no way to know which UCP manager node is not healthy. So make sure you make a request directly to each manager node.

Where to go next

chat icon Feedback? Suggestions? Can't find something in the docs?
Edit this page Request docs changes Get support
Rate this page: