Issues with Docker Monitoring in Swarm Mode: Container Name Changes on Restart

[still_at_work]

Hello everyone,

I’m using Zabbix to monitor my Docker containers, and overall, it works very well. I’ve set up discovery to track containers and monitor their metrics efficiently.

However, since I started using Docker Swarm, I’ve encountered a challenge. Each time the Docker containers are restarted (due to scaling, updates, or node changes), their names change. For example, a container might be named app_mycontainer.1.xxyz1234 initially, but after a restart, it could be renamed to something like app_mycontainer.1.abcd5678.

This behavior causes issues in Zabbix:

• Old container names remain in Zabbix with no metrics (because the containers no longer exist).
• New container names are treated as entirely new entities, triggering alerts for the "missing" containers.

I’d like to know if anyone has experienced a similar issue and how you resolved it. Is there a way to handle this dynamically in Zabbix to avoid accumulating non-existent containers and to prevent unnecessary alerts when containers are replaced in Swarm mode?

Here are the specifics of my setup:

• Zabbix Version: 6.4.16
• Docker Setup: Using Docker Swarm
• Monitoring Template: Docker by Zabbix Agent 2
• Problem: Container names change on restart due to Docker Swarm's naming convention.

Thank you in advance for your help!

[Jan_Prusinowski]

Have you considered using labels instead of Docker container IDs? Labels are static, even if a container changes its name during a restart. Zabbix can be configured to discover and monitor containers based on these labels rather than container names. Would this solution work for you?

[duarte936]

Hi everyone,

I'm facing the same issue
I already tried the following solution: https://medium.com/@archonkulis/zabb...y-b9ffc2b76652, but unfortunately, this template can't even connect to Docker, so I'm stuck at this point.

I would really appreciate any help!

Thank you in advance!

[JJJosph]

Hello everyone,

I would like to know if there is a solution to this problem?

Thank you in advance for your help!

[Brambo]

I don't use this plugin, but looking at the code of the discovery.go I see that #ID and #NAME are provided as macro's.
You could try to test this #ID macro in the item key, however as I don't now which values are returned by the macro this also could have unexpected results.

[toontoet]

I've created a agent2 plugin to get some extra docker swarm stacks and services into zabbix: https://github.com/toontoet/zabbix-a...n-docker-swarm

[Tristis Oris]

Sounds great, but do we need a new template for this?