  Docker is a virtualization technique heavily used in the industry to build
cloud-based systems. In the context of Docker, a system is said to be
observable if engineers can get accurate information about its running state in
production. In this paper, we present a novel approach, called POBS, to
automatically improve the observability of Dockerized Java applications. POBS
is based on automated transformations of Docker configuration files. Our
approach injects additional modules in the production application, in order to
provide better observability. We evaluate POBS by applying it on open-source
Java applications which are containerized with Docker. Our key result is that
148/170 (87%) of Docker Java containers can be automatically augmented with
better observability.
