What is cAdvisor used for?

cAdvisor is a daemon from Google that collects and exports resource usage and performance data for running containers. It is a good fit for monitoring container resource consumption and collecting per-node metrics in Kubernetes clusters.

Is cAdvisor open source?

Yes. cAdvisor is open source under a custom licence. Its source code is on GitHub at google/cadvisor and is written mainly in Go.

Yes. cAdvisor is open source, so the software itself is free to use under the terms of its own licence.

Can I self-host cAdvisor?

Yes. cAdvisor can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.

What are some alternatives to cAdvisor?

Similar open-source tools in the Monitoring & Observability category include Netdata, VictoriaMetrics and Cortex. SaaS products in the same category include Amazon CloudWatch, Azure Monitor and Chronosphere.

Is cAdvisor actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to cAdvisor was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v0.60.6, published on 18 September 2026. The project has 19k stars on GitHub.

cAdvisor: open-source monitoring & observability

About cAdvisor

cAdvisor, short for Container Advisor, is a daemon that gives container users insight into the resource usage and performance of their running containers. For each container it collects and aggregates resource isolation parameters, historical resource usage, histograms of that usage and network statistics, and it exports the data per container and for the whole machine.

It has native support for Docker containers and is designed to work with other container types as well, treating containers as a nested hierarchy. A quick start runs cAdvisor itself as a Docker container and serves a web interface on port 8080, and it can also run standalone outside Docker or as a Kubernetes DaemonSet.

cAdvisor is written in Go and maintained in Google's GitHub organization. The repository lists the license as 'Other'. It is a self-run component with no hosted edition mentioned, so teams deploy it on their own hosts alongside the containers they want to watch.

Key features

Per-container resource usage collection
Historical usage data and histograms
Network statistics per container
Native Docker container support
Runs standalone or as a Kubernetes DaemonSet
Web interface served on port 8080

Good fit for

→Monitoring container resource consumption
→Collecting per-node metrics in Kubernetes clusters

Built with: Go
Tags: containers; docker; monitoring; kubernetes; metrics; observability; golang; daemon

cAdvisor: questions and answers

What is cAdvisor used for?: cAdvisor is a daemon from Google that collects and exports resource usage and performance data for running containers. It is a good fit for monitoring container resource consumption and collecting per-node metrics in Kubernetes clusters.
Is cAdvisor open source?: Yes. cAdvisor is open source under a custom licence. Its source code is on GitHub at google/cadvisor and is written mainly in Go.
Is cAdvisor free?: Yes. cAdvisor is open source, so the software itself is free to use under the terms of its own licence.
Can I self-host cAdvisor?: Yes. cAdvisor can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.
What are some alternatives to cAdvisor?: Similar open-source tools in the Monitoring & Observability category include Netdata, VictoriaMetrics and Cortex. SaaS products in the same category include Amazon CloudWatch, Azure Monitor and Chronosphere.
Is cAdvisor actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to cAdvisor was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v0.60.6, published on 18 September 2026. The project has 19k stars on GitHub.