Alerts for containers in bluemix

Question

This Monday 24th, I had a problem with a container and Secure Gateway Client in Bluemix. The container was stopped and SecureGatewayClient was inhibited (it answered error 500 but it showed Started)

Is it possible to send an alert for a Container of Bluemix, for example, the alert will send an email or call an API if the container will stop?

In the case of SecureGatewayClient, I think to monitor the services through the SecureGateway, every 5 minutes I will test the services, but I can accept more ideas...

Answer 1

I can't really speak to potential container issues, but I can provide some details on how the Secure Gateway Client works. The Secure Gateway Client runs as a clustered process where the actual connective pieces are worker processes beneath a single management process. Because of this, if the worker process goes down, the container is essentially none the wiser as long as the management process is still running, as the management process is the entry point for the container.

The Secure Gateway Client supports a --service option that will cause the management process to monitor the worker count. Should the worker count reach 0, the manager will create new workers with the credentials passed on startup.

For example, starting with:

ibmcom/secure-gateway-client myGatewayID -t myGatewaySecurityToken --service

would spawn a worker that will attempt to connect to myGatewayID . Should that worker process terminate for some reason, the management process would create a new worker within 60s as a replacement.