New support for Podman inventory on Linux

IT Asset Management version 2024 R1.4

Podman has emerged as the industry standard for container management, replacing Docker on many servers, including those running Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The FlexNet Inventory Agent now supports inventory collection from Podman on Linux. This new feature ensures comprehensive inventory management and aligns with the industry shift towards Podman, particularly in environments like OpenShift where Podman serves as the underlying container runtime.

Visibility of your Podman containers is disabled by default. To enable Podman inventory and running inventory agent inside Podman containers, go to the Inventory Settings page (Data Collection > IT Assets Inventory Tasks > Inventory Settings) and select the corresponding checkbox in the Container scanning section.

Note: As Podman is designed to be user-centric with containers managed on a per-user basis, each user has their own set of containers and other users cannot access or manage them. Therefore, the Podman monitor requires root privileges to collect containers and image inventory from all users using Podman on the system. If your FlexNet Inventory Agent is operating in the Least Privilege Operation Mode, you need to grant root privileges to the Podman monitor by adding /opt/managesoft/libexec/fnms-podman-monitor to the Cmnd_Alias FLEXERA command alias in the sudoers file /etc/sudoers.d/flexera. For a sample sudoers file, see Agent Third-Party Deployment: Sample Sudoers File

For more information, see the following topics in the Gathering FlexNet Inventory:

New FlexNet Inventory Agent preference PerformPodmanInventoryScan.
Updated FlexNet Inventory Agent preferences ExcludeDirectory and ExcludeEmbedFileContentDirectory, where the default behavior on Linux platforms has changed.
Agent Third-Party Deployment: Least Privilege Operation Mode.

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