Container monitoring is a process of collecting and analyzing performance data from containerized applications to detect and troubleshoot problems. It shares similarities with traditional application performance monitoring (APM) in that it collects metrics, logs, and traces, but it differs due to the unique nature of containers, which generate different types of observability data and have ephemeral characteristics. Effective container monitoring requires correlating data from across all layers of the hosting stack, monitoring continuously in real-time, managing data efficiently, keeping tools lightweight, and being agnostic to various container environments. The best practices for container monitoring include using a platform-agnostic tool like groundcover, which enables fast, accurate insights into cloud-native environments, and adopting intelligent alerting capabilities, distributed tracing, and support for monitoring the entire stack.