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Proxmox Backup Server Monitoring Plugin

This Checkmk plugin monitors Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) via its REST API, providing comprehensive monitoring of datastores, backup jobs, and per-guest backup freshness through piggyback integration. To use this plugin, you need an Audit-role API token configured on your PBS instance. For detailed design information and implementation notes, see the design specification.

Configuration notes

Ignoring retained backups

Ignore these backup groups (regex) in the special agent rule suppresses all monitoring of matching backup groups — no piggyback service, no entry in the PBS Backups roll-up, no missing-guest-name complaint. Use it when a machine has been decommissioned but its backups are deliberately retained.

Patterns are searched (not anchored) in the group path <datastore>/<namespace>/<type>/<id>. With no namespace the path contains a double slash:

Pattern Effect
vm/105$ ignores VMID 105 in every datastore and namespace
^store1/tenantA/ ignores everything in namespace tenantA of store1
/host/oldbox$ ignores the host/oldbox backup group in every datastore and namespace

Ignored groups still count towards the datastore's group and backup totals — the data is still on disk. The PBS Server service reports how many groups are currently ignored (groups in datastores excluded from piggyback via "Datastores without per-guest piggyback" are never monitored in the first place and are not counted), so a pattern that has outlived its purpose stays visible.

Suppressing the agent output does not remove a PBS Backup ... service that was already discovered, and if the guest exists in Checkmk only as a piggyback host, its piggyback file simply stops being refreshed — after piggyback_max_cachefile_age that shows up as a no-data alert instead of the stale-backup warning you were trying to silence. After adding a pattern, either remove the now data-less piggyback host from Checkmk, or, if the host has other data sources, re-run service discovery on it to drop the stale PBS Backup service. The same applies to a group ignored on a host that stays monitored for other reasons.

PBS running as a VM on the cluster it backs up

When PBS itself is a Proxmox guest and is backed up to its own datastore, its backup would otherwise be piggybacked to the very host that produced the agent output. The agent detects this — the resolved piggyback host name matches the Checkmk host name exactly, ignoring case — and reports the backup as a normal PBS Backup ... service on the PBS host instead. No configuration is needed.

The match is exact: if the PVE guest name is pbs01 but the Checkmk host is pbs01.example.com, they do not match and the backup is piggybacked as before. Align the two names, or use the piggyback host rewrite, to enable the inline reporting.

Development

For contributor setup, create a symlink from your Checkmk's local/lib/check_mk directory to this repository's local/lib/check_mk directory to enable live testing of changes.

About

Checkmk special agent for Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) — datastore usage/GC, sync/verify/prune jobs, and per-guest backup freshness via piggyback, over the PBS REST API.

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