Prometheus Node Exporter Podman

Prometheus metrics collectors for Podman containers on OpenWrt, designed for use with prometheus-node-exporter-lua.

Table of Contents

• Features
• Packages
• Requirements
• Installation
• Usage
• Metrics Reference
• Credits

Features

• Container Metrics: State, info, timestamps, exit codes, restart counts
• Pod Metrics: State, container counts, metadata
• Image Metrics: Size, creation time, metadata
• Network & Volume Metrics: Configuration and metadata
• System Metrics: Podman version, API version, runtime info
• Per-Container Stats: CPU, memory, network I/O, block I/O, PIDs
• Low Overhead: Optimized API calls (~300ms basic, ~200ms stats)
• Native Unix Socket: Direct communication via /run/podman/podman.sock

Packages

Package	Overhead	Description
prometheus-node-exporter-lua-podman	~300ms	Basic metrics for containers, pods, images, networks, volumes, system
prometheus-node-exporter-lua-podman-container	~200ms	Per-container resource stats (CPU, memory, network, block I/O)

Requirements

• OpenWrt 24.10.x
• Podman with API socket enabled
• prometheus-node-exporter-lua

Installation

From Package Feed

You can setup the package feed to install and update with opkg:

https://github.com/Zerogiven-OpenWRT-Packages/package-feed

From IPK Package

Download from the Releases page:

opkg update
opkg install prometheus-node-exporter-lua-podman_*.ipk
opkg install prometheus-node-exporter-lua-podman-container_*.ipk

From Source

git clone https://github.com/Zerogiven-OpenWRT-Packages/prometheus-node-exporter-lua-podman.git package/prometheus-node-exporter-lua-podman
make menuconfig  # Navigate to: Utilities → prometheus-node-exporter-lua-podman
make package/prometheus-node-exporter-lua-podman/compile V=s

Usage

After installation, the collectors are automatically available. Ensure Podman is running:

/etc/init.d/podman start
/etc/init.d/podman enable

Metrics are available at the standard node exporter endpoint:

http://your-router-ip:9100/metrics

Prometheus Configuration

If collectors don't appear in the default scrape, explicitly request them:

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: 'openwrt'
    params:
      collect:
        - podman
        - podman-container
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['router:9100']

Metrics Reference

Basic Package (podman.lua)

Container Metrics

Metric	Type	Description
podman_container_info	gauge	Container metadata (image, name, id, ports, pod)
podman_container_state	gauge	Container state as numeric value
podman_container_created_seconds	gauge	Container creation timestamp
podman_container_started_seconds	gauge	Container start timestamp
podman_container_exited_seconds	gauge	Container exit timestamp
podman_container_exit_code	gauge	Container exit code
podman_container_restarts_total	counter	Number of container restarts

Pod Metrics

Metric	Type	Description
podman_pod_info	gauge	Pod metadata
podman_pod_state	gauge	Pod state as numeric value
podman_pod_containers	gauge	Number of containers in pod
podman_pod_created_seconds	gauge	Pod creation timestamp

Image, Network, Volume, System Metrics

Metric	Type	Description
podman_image_info	gauge	Image metadata
podman_image_size_bytes	gauge	Image size
podman_network_info	gauge	Network metadata (driver, interface)
podman_volume_info	gauge	Volume metadata
podman_system_api_version	gauge	Podman API version

Container Stats Package (podman-container.lua)

Metric	Type	Description
podman_container_cpu_seconds_total	counter	CPU time consumed
podman_container_cpu_system_seconds_total	counter	System CPU time
podman_container_mem_usage_bytes	gauge	Current memory usage
podman_container_mem_limit_bytes	gauge	Memory limit
podman_container_pids	gauge	Number of processes
podman_container_block_input_total	counter	Block I/O read bytes
podman_container_block_output_total	counter	Block I/O write bytes
podman_container_net_input_total	counter	Network received bytes
podman_container_net_output_total	counter	Network transmitted bytes

State Mappings

Container states are mapped to numeric values for Prometheus:

State	Value
unknown	-1
created	0
initialized	1
running	2
stopped	3
paused	4
exited	5
removing	6
stopping	7

Credits

• prometheus-node-exporter-lua - OpenWrt metrics framework
• prometheus-podman-exporter
• Podman - Container runtime