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Advanced container configuration

This page covers optional configuration for a poller deployed in a container, beyond the default centengine and gorgone services.

Allow the poller to use custom plugins for monitoring​

This section only applies if you want to use your own custom plugins for monitoring. No action is needed to use the official Centreon monitoring connectors.

The centengine container can install custom check scripts and extra APT dependencies without rebuilding the image.

In the generated docker-compose.yaml, add the following volumes to the centengine service :

    volumes:
      # Custom plugin scripts (must be executable)
      - ./custom-plugins:/usr/lib/nagios/plugins/custom:ro
      # Extra APT packages, installed at startup
      - ./custom-deps.json:/etc/centreon-engine/custom-deps.json:ro

  • Create a custom-plugins directory and store your custom plugin scripts there. The container will copy them to /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/custom.

  • If your plugin needs system dependencies, you must declare them in a custom-deps.json file. For example:

    {
      "apt": ["snmp", "jq"]
    }

    This file is read when the container starts, and watched for changes afterward: editing it on the host triggers an automatic install of the listed packages, with no need to restart the container. Package installation runs in the background, so centengine is not blocked while it happens.

  • You will need to add your custom commands to the poller's command whitelist.

Baking dependencies into a custom image​

If you have a large number of dependencies, you can build a custom image on top of the official one instead of adding the dependencies one by one to the custom-deps.json file. Your custom image will be deployed using the docker-compose.

FROM ghcr.io/centreon/centreon-engine:26.10

RUN sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
      snmp \
      jq \
    && sudo apt-get clean

Build it, then reference it as ENGINE_TAG (or override the image: value directly) in your docker-compose.yaml. The main advantage of this approach is startup time: when a poller needs many dependencies, installing them once at build time is faster than installing them every time the container starts via custom-deps.json.

Allow the poller to monitor VMware resources​

Follow this procedure before you deploy a poller in a container using the --with-vmware option.

Monitoring VMware infrastructure requires the proprietary VMware Perl SDK: the daemon cannot start at all without it, even with plain-text credentials. Because the SDK cannot be redistributed for licensing reasons, the centreon-vmware container image is not published on a registry. The generated docker-compose.yaml references it as connector-vmware:${VMWARE_TAG:-local} with pull_policy: never, so you must build it locally, on the container host, before using --with-vmware.

Download the SDK archives from the Broadcom developer portal (see the prerequisites of the VMware ESX monitoring connector for instructions), then clone centreon-plugins, place the archives in its sdks-vmware directory, and build the image:

git clone https://github.com/centreon/centreon-plugins.git
cd centreon-plugins
# Place the downloaded SDK archives in sdks-vmware/ before building
docker build \
  --file .github/docker/connector/Dockerfile.connector-vmware \
  --tag connector-vmware:local \
  .

This downloads the latest package from Centreon's stable APT repository and includes the SDK by default. Add --build-arg VERSION=<version> to pin a specific release, or --build-arg PACKAGE_SOURCE=mount to build from a .deb package placed in a packages-centreon directory instead. Building with --build-arg WITH_SDK=false only validates that the image builds: the resulting daemon cannot start, since the SDK is required in all cases.

Allow the poller to receive data from Centreon Monitoring Agents (CMA)​

Add --with-cma to the poller install command so that centengine can accept connections from the Centreon Monitoring Agent over OpenTelemetry gRPC. Using --with-cma adds the following to the centengine service in the docker-compose:

    volumes:
      - ./certs/poller.crt:/etc/pki/poller.crt:ro
      - ./certs/poller.key:/etc/pki/poller.key:ro
    ports:
      - "4317:4317"

Then generate the corresponding TLS certificates and configure the agent side following Configuring certificates and Setting up the agent's environment.