Podman Observability & Performance Monitoring | Rootless & Rootful Support

Monitor your Podman infrastructure with rootless container support. Get secure observability reducing security risks with non-admin container monitoring. eG Enterprise provides end-to-end visibility to identify and correlate performance issues within the underlying infrastructure and applications running on Podman.

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The next-gen monitoring solution
for your Podman ecosystem

eG Enterprise is an enterprise-class, converged application and IT monitoring solution that provides unified performance visibility into Podman containers and the applications, services and databases running on them as well as infrastructure, cloud and other service dependencies.

Whether you are using Podman for modern app development, microservices, CI/CD, digital transformation, DevOps, or edge computing, eG Enterprise delivers the performance visibility needed to assure success of your IT initiatives.

  • From a central console, get metrics, events, logs and traces from across your container environment in real-time out-of-the-box
  • Understand resource usage and capacity needs to futureproof container provisioning
  • Obtain code-level visibility of applications running inside Podman containers. Detailed automated root-cause diagnostics reveal even code level issues
  • AIOps technologies auto-baseline behavior and proactively alert on anomalies, slowdowns and unusual behavior
Docker monitoring
  • Ensure 24x7 availability and high performance of the Podman Container Engine
  • Automate monitoring in your auto-scaling Podman environment. Metric thresholds and alerting are determined and configured out-of-the-box without manual effort
  • Available as a fully managed ready-to-go SaaS monitoring service. Self-managed on-prem or in cloud options are also available for those with compliance or regulatory needs

eG Enterprise for Podman monitoring

eG Enterprise provides you with comprehensive Podman monitoring of key components that determine application and Podman Container Engine performance including images, pods and containers. Monitor both rootless and rootful Podman containers within a single console.

  • Get proactive alerting out-of-the-box of potential performance bottlenecks, no need to manually configure alerts
  • Track which containers have been created and removed, and which are running, stopped and paused
  • Detect capacity issues and see where there are not enough hardware or cloud resources for your applications or Podman containers
  • Use transaction tracing to identify bottlenecks impacting the end-user experience
  • Leverage resource utilization trends and historical analytics help forecast future capacity requirements

eG Enterprise also monitors and correlates alerts from the Operating System, TCP, and Network layers that Podman has dependencies upon.

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Features

Get alerted to bottlenecks in Podman Container performance

  • Know how long each container has been up and whether it has been restarted
  • Get details of containers being added and removed; track which containers are running, stopped and paused
  • Isolate containers that are large in size and ones that have not been started for a long time
  • Track container events in real time: create, delete, start, stop and die events
  • Monitor CPU, memory and disk utilization of every Podman container and get alerted to high usage levels
Container monitoring
  • Monitor if the Podman service is installed and loaded and continuously track the service status

Detect capacity issues and resource constraints

As well as support for on-prem IT infrastructure, eG Enterprise provides out-of-the-box cloud monitoring support for applications and services running on the public cloud including AWS and Microsoft Azure.

  • Monitor the images mapped and not mapped to containers
  • Drill down to see which images are taking more disk space and how long ago they were created
  • Monitor the processes running on the Podman Engine and their CPU and memory utilization
Podman performance monitoring
  • Get alerted if the data space usage exceeds threshold levels
  • Obtain granular visibility into resource availability and utilization: disk space, disk activity, I/O waits, memory, and more
  • Track how well data is transmitted and received from each container. Continually monitor the rate of errors that are transmitted through each container

Monitoring the performance and user experience of containerized applications

  • Get health, availability and performance metrics for applications running on the Podman containers
  • Leverage distributed transaction tracing and identify slowness in application business transactions
  • Gain code-level visibility of web applications and debug errors before the application moves to production
  • Use a combination of synthetic simulation and real user monitoring to measure user experience of users accessing the applications
Transaction tracing in container environments

Monitoring the Kubernetes platform

In context of Podman containers, eG Enterprise provides visibility of the container orchestration platform, Kubernetes (K8s).

  • Monitor the key services on the Kubernetes Master: API server, scheduler, controller manager, and etcd
  • Get detailed performance insight of Kubernetes nodes, pod allocation, CPU and memory allocation, image usage and deployment status
  • Understand resource usage patterns and determine how much additional workload can be deployed per node
  • Monitor jobs, pods, deployments and daemonsets by namespaces and get alerted to performance and capacity bottlenecks
Kubernetes monitoring

Answer key performance questions

  • What is the load on Podman containers? Which containers are consuming the most CPU or memory?
  • What performance thresholds should I set to avoid resource exhaustion?
  • How can I optimize container performance across multiple Podman clusters?
  • Are there containers that are restarting frequently?
  • How can I track historical CPU and memory usage trends for my Podman containers?

eG Enterprise natively supports 650+ infrastructure components, Cloud providers and applications. Which means that it provides out-of-the-box deep insights, thresholds, dashboards and reports for any of these 650+ components.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
about Podman Monitoring

Rootful Podman containers run with root privileges, offering full system access, while rootless containers operate under a user account, enhancing security by limiting permissions (root access is prevented if a container is compromised) and isolating processes from the host system. There is, of course, a higher potential security risk if a rootful container is breached. It is considered best practice to utilize rootless containers for improved security and isolation whenever possible.

Rootful Podman containers are used when:

  • Advanced Capabilities Are Required: Root access is needed for operations like binding to privileged ports (<1024) or modifying system files.
  • Legacy Applications: Some applications may require root privileges to function properly.
  • Performance Needs: Rootful containers can access certain system features directly, potentially improving performance in specific scenarios.
  • Compatibility: Testing or replicating environments where applications run as root (e.g., traditional Docker setups).
  • Network behavior: Rootful and rootless containers have different network behaviors. See: Configuring container networking with Podman for more information.
  • Create new devices: Some containers need to create new devices or loopback mount points, which can only be done as root.

While rootless Podman containers are safer, rootful containers are used in some scenarios when full system access is necessary for functionality or testing. In most production environments where security is a primary concern rootless containers should be used.

Yes, the eG Enterprise universal agent can monitor both seamlessly and can also provide comprehensive full stack monitoring across your containerized environments.

Start your free trial or schedule a custom demo with an engineer

  • Works on cloud environments, hybrid cloud setups and on-premises deployments
  • Deploy eG Enterprise using our SaaS platform or on-premises
  • Suitable for monitoring cloud applications, digital workspaces and IT infrastructures
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