I have had some troubles making cAdvisor work on Debian, especially returning data on the memory, and I wanted to share the solution! The use case is a Docker based PaaS dedicated to Java/JEE applications.

By default, the Cgroup memory controller is in the state missing on Debian, so cAdvisor does not collect the relevant data.

The solution simply consists in adding the line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="cgroup_enable=memory"

to the file /etc/default/grub. Then, one has to run: sudo update-grub2 and reboot.

A more detailed article is available on our blog.