Container Discovery Control

By default, both containerized and bare metal agents discover all containers. You can change the default behavior in the YAML file to specify which containers to exclude from discovery.

Inclusion and exclusion use cases

The following figure shows example container filtering scenarios for a cluster that has three namespaces:

logging
monitoring
testing


Use case	Inclusion	Exclusion/th>
Monitor single namespace monitoring	namespace:monitoring	namespace:.*
Monitor everything except namespace logging		namespace:logging
Do not monitor namespaces monitoring and logging		namespace:monitoring namespace:logging
Monitor only one Container with name logger-beta-abcde in namespace logging	container_name:logger-beta-abcde	namespace:logging
Monitor only a single container with image name agent	image_name: agent	namespace:monitoring namespace:logging namespace:testing or namespace:.*
Do not monitor containers with name starting with log		container_name: log.* or container_name:log
Do not monitor containers with image name starting with log		image_name:log.* or image_name:log

Enable Container Discovery

Two keys control container inclusion or exclusion:


Key	Description
`INCLUDE_CONTAINER`	Criteria for including containers. Example to include container by image name: name: INCLUDE_CONTAINER value: "image_name:lighttpd2"
`EXCLUDE_CONTAINER`	Criteria for excluding containers. Example to exclude containers by namespace: name: EXCLUDE_CONTAINER value: "namespace:.*"

Both keys accept one of the following single input rule values for specifying inclusion and exclusion:

namespace, which applies only to Kubernetes and its spins
image_name
container_name

Rule specification

Rule values have the following general format:

namespace:<namespace_name1>, namespace:<namespace_name2>, image_name:<image_name1>, image_name:<image_name2>, container_name:<container_name1>, container_name:<container_name2>

Rules are comma-delimited and must be key:value pairs.

Regex is supported when specifying inclusion and exclusion values. By default, the string is checked for containing the value so the full string does not need to be provided when specifying a value.

Install and virtual machine rule specification

During agent installation, use the following -E and -I options to the configure binary. For example:

sudo /opt/opsramp/agent/bin/configure -K T2fTf...4m9c -S UGWjhy...mKPnRuM -s <hostServer> -E "namespace:testing" -I "image_name:lighttpd2"

For a virtual machine these options are in the configuration.properties Misc section. For example:

exclude_container = namespace:.*
include_container = image_name:lighttpd2

Disable Container Discovery

To disable all container discovery, set the disable variable in the containers env section of the agent YAML file:

name: DISABLE_CONTAINER_DISCOVERY
value: "TRUE"

Inclusion and exclusion setting results


Inclusion	Exclusion	Result
Not set	Not set	All containers discovered
Some filter	Not set	All containers discovered
Not Set	Some filter	All containers except those that match the exclusion filter
Some filter	Some filter	All containers except those that match the exclusion filter, plus excluded containers that match the inclusion filter