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Werk #18724: Introduced Podman Monitoring

Component Checks & agents
Title Introduced Podman Monitoring
Date Oct 20, 2025
Level Trivial Change
Class New Feature
Compatibility Compatible - no manual interaction needed
Checkmk versions & editions
2.5.0b1
Not yet released
Checkmk Raw (CRE), Checkmk Enterprise (CEE), Checkmk Cloud (CCE), Checkmk MSP (CME)

This werk introduces monitoring support for Podman containers and pods. The new monitoring includes both host-level and per-container services.

Host-level Services

The following services are created on the Podman host:
- Podman containers: Monitors the total number of containers in different states (running, stopped, dead, etc.) with configurable thresholds
- Podman pods: Monitors the total number of pods in different states (running, created, stopped, dead, exited) with configurable thresholds
- Podman disk usage: Monitors disk space usage for containers, images, and volumes with size-based thresholds
- Podman status: Reports any errors encountered when querying the Podman API

Per-container Services (Piggyback)

Each container is monitored as a separate piggyback host with the following services:
- Status: Monitors the operational state of the container (running, stopped, etc.) with configurable state mappings
- Health: Monitors container health check status when health checks are configured
- Restarts: Tracks container restart count with rate-based alerting
- CPU utilization: Monitors container CPU usage percentage
- Memory: Monitors container memory usage with percentage and absolute thresholds
- Container IO: Monitors disk I/O operations (read/write operations per second)
- Uptime: Tracks how long the container has been running

Inventory Information

The monitoring also provides inventory data for:
- Podman engine: Version, API version, rootless mode, registries, and hostname
- Per-container details: Hostname, labels, network configuration (IP, gateway, MAC address)

Configuration

Podman monitoring is configured via the "Podman Monitoring" agent rule.
The monitoring supports:
- Automatic socket detection for both root and user Podman instances
- Manual socket path specification for custom configurations

Prerequisites

  • Python 3.9 or newer must be available on the monitored host
  • Python package requests_unixsocket must be installed (required for communicating with Podman’s UNIX socket)

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