How to monitor Droplets in DigitalOcean
Site24x7 continuously monitors your DigitalOcean Droplets metrics, giving your team real-time visibility into CPU utilization, memory consumption, disk, and network bandwidth so you can detect issues before they escalate and avoid costly downtime.
With the DigitalOcean Droplet monitor, fine-tune resource allocation and scale intelligently as your application grows, allowing you to gain peace of mind with a performance edge.
Use case
CPU stability: Prevent performance drops by tracking CPU and CPU I/O Wait time, helping to identify compute or contention issues early.
Memory control: Avoid crashes by monitoring memory available, enabling early detection of leaks before any critical processes are terminated.
Network insight: Optimize throughput by tracking bandwidth across interfaces, enabling quick detection of traffic spikes and unexpected data usage.
Setup and configuration
Droplets resources are auto-discovered and monitored during the DigitalOcean integration. To enable monitoring, follow the steps below:
- Navigate to Cloud > DigitalOcean > Add DigitalOcean Monitor. Follow these steps to add a DigitalOcean monitor.
- While adding or editing a DigitalOcean monitor, select Droplet from the Service/Resource Types drop-down and click Save.
- Go to Cloud > DigitalOcean, select the created DigitalOcean monitor, and then click Droplet.
Droplets will be discovered during the next discovery cycle according to the discovery frequency you selected during DigitalOcean monitor creation.
Data collection frequency
Based on the selected poll interval, performance metrics of your DigitalOcean Droplets will be collected every two minutes and updated in the Site24x7 portal every five minutes by default.
Supported metrics
| Metric name | Description | Units |
|---|---|---|
| CPU User | The amount of CPU time spent executing user-space processes on the Droplet. | Hour |
| CPU System | The amount of CPU time spent executing kernel-level system calls and operations. | Hour |
| CPU Nice | CPU time consumed by user-space processes running at a lower scheduling priority. | Minute |
| CPU Idle | Number of days the processor is idle and awaiting work. | Day |
| CPU Steal | CPU time stolen by the hypervisor to service other virtual machines on the same host. | Hour |
| CPU IOWait | Time spent by the CPU for pending I/O operations to complete. | Minute |
| CPU IRQ | CPU time consumed handling hardware interrupt requests. | Second |
| CPU SoftIRQ | CPU time consumed processing software interrupt requests deferred from hardware IRQs. | Minute |
| Memory Total | Total physical RAM allocated to the Droplet as reported by the OS. | MB |
| Memory Available | Amount of memory currently available for allocation by applications without swapping. | MB |
| Memory Free | Physical memory that is completely unused and not assigned to any process or cache. | MB |
| Memory Cached | Memory used by the kernel's page cache to accelerate file system reads. | MB |
| Load 1 min Average | Average number of processes in the run queue or waiting for CPU or IO over the last one minute. | Count |
| Load 5 min Average | Average system load across all CPUs measured over a five-minute rolling window. | Count |
| Load 15 min Average | Average system load across all CPUs measured over a 15-minute rolling window. | Count |
| Inbound Public Bandwidth | Rate of incoming data received on the Droplet's public network interface. | Bit/second |
| Outbound Public Bandwidth | Rate of outgoing data transmitted on the Droplet's public network interface. | Bit/second |
| Inbound Private Bandwidth | Rate of incoming data received on the Droplet's private or VPC network interface. | Bit/second |
| Outbound Private Bandwidth | Rate of outgoing data transmitted on the Droplet's private or VPC network interface. | Bit/second |
Threshold configuration
You can configure thresholds and alerts for all Droplets metrics to proactively detect performance degradation and connection issues.
- Go to Admin > Configuration Profiles > Threshold and Availability.
- Create or edit your Threshold Profile for Droplets.
- Assign the profile to the respective monitors to trigger alerts.
IT Automation
Use Site24x7's IT Automation to resolve common issues with Droplets performance:
- Go to Admin > IT Automation Templates. Then, click Add Automation Templates.
- Create an automation rule by selecting the automation Type (e.g., Server reboot, clear queue).
- Map the created rules to the Droplets, for automatic execution during alerts.
Configuration rules
Use Configuration Rules to simplify bulk setup across Droplets instances. Automatically assign Threshold Profiles, Notification Profiles, Tags, and Monitor Groups when new monitors are discovered.