As you might expect, this week's LinuxCon and ContainerCon 2016, held in Toronto, is heavy on the benefits and pitfalls of deploying containers, but several vendors aim to come to the rescue with flexible tools to manage it all.

Take Datadog, a New York-based company that offers scalable monitoring of your containerized infrastructure—and just about everything else—from a single interface. This is an off-premise, cloud-based tool that can monitor tens of thousands of your hosts and integrate with stuff you already know, like AWS, Cassandra, Docker, Kubernetes, Postgre and 150 other tools.

Datadog's IaaS monitoring service works by running open-source agents on your physical, virtual or containterized hosts and returning graphical streams of data. Overlays can show you metrics from multiple services at once, perhaps showing you that traffic suddenly tanked on your webservers at the same time your databases stalled. Sign up for free monitoring of up to five hosts here.

Other LinuxCon/ContainerCon vendors are offering similar products that look to make life easier for anyone with hybrid environments of on-premise and cloud-based systems and applications.

Virtuozzo's latest offering is a comprehensive virtualization platform that allows you to deploy and manage any combination of operating systems, applications, VMs and containers. At the same time, Sysdig offers SaaS monitoring, troubleshooting and alerting for distributed containerized environments.

As with others, the key is enabling IT shops to mix legacy metal and VM monitoring with new container monitoring for easy management and quick troubleshooting. Sysdig's goal sums it up well: to make maintenance easy so "Ops teams can spend more time on the fun part of their jobs."