So you’d like to run a single collector on your dockerhosts. You want to send to that instance from each container running on the host. I spent a a couple hours trying to make this happen using environment variables and eventually gave up. I’m also using Macvlan. The same should apply for Ipvlan.
Here’s what I did.
Spin up statds, dogstats, whatever collector du jour, on your dockerhost. Run it with --network="host". Make sure you also publish the ports its listening on (8125).
Add an entry to /etc/hosts on your dockerhost.
mydockerhost# echo "`hostname -i` dockerhost" >> /etc/hosts
When you launch your container, make sure you set a bind mount for your host’s /etc/hosts to mount to your container’s /host/etc/hosts. Obviously you can mount to whatever directory you want, but I just to toss everything in /host.
mydockerhost# docker service create --name myapp --mount type=bind,src=/etc/hosts,dst=/host/etc/hosts:ro myapp/myapp
In the entrypoint script for your container, toss in some logic that greps /host/etc/hosts for “dockerhost” and echos that one line, appending it to your container’s /etc/hosts file.
mydockerhost# grep dockerhost /host/etc/hosts >> /etc/hosts
Make it rain. Now you can point your statsd client to dockerhost.