How to prevent logflood by Traefik under Podman?

Ask Fedora
1

Hello all,

Using Fedora 43 with Podman 5.7.0 and Traefik:latest. I run several containers with PHP and MariaDB. HTTP routing is handled by Traefik and subdomains on localhost. This works very well.

At least since several days, my syslog (journalctl --follow) gets flooded with GET-calls to some podman /json endpoint. Every second, at least 20-30 calls are logged. For example:

dec 07 18:07:16 WaanzinsPC4 podman[165792]: @ - - [07/Dec/2025:18:07:16 +0100] "GET /v1.41/containers/7acc7dcde39ee104beb4525615645ef2a18e115641e01a6dd005bf4a65f0b827/json HTTP/1.1" 200 9543 "" "Traefik 3.6.2"

Can I disable this logging, or find the cause and fix it?
Any help would be very much appreciated.

Thanks and kind regards,
FWieP

2

Increase log level in your container definition to WARN

3

Thanks for the suggestion. The loglevel was already at WARN.

I’ve narrowed the issue down to a combination of Traefik and container healthchecks.
When I start only Traefik, nothing is logged. As soon as I start one MariaDB container with a healthcheck having a 10s interval, I see these lines logged:

A GET-call to /v1.41/containers/<hash>/json for every running container, every 10s or less (depending on when the check-intervals overlap).

dec 08 17:29:04 WaanzinsPC4 podman[219312]: @ - - [08/Dec/2025:17:29:04 +0100] "GET /v1.41/containers/json?all=1 HTTP/1.1" 200 5448 "" "Traefik 3.6.4"
dec 08 17:29:04 WaanzinsPC4 podman[219312]: @ - - [08/Dec/2025:17:29:04 +0100] "GET /v1.41/containers/90da98d7e4c36e6d096d701185199d99b2992fd04e5dd78f0149340a0269a98d/json HTTP/1.1" 200 7446 "" "Traefik 3.6.4"
dec 08 17:29:04 WaanzinsPC4 podman[219312]: @ - - [08/Dec/2025:17:29:04 +0100] "GET /v1.41/containers/2fd3f855d2d0732c7933467aebe060582240d4174394496a52d503257417af02/json HTTP/1.1" 200 8621 "" "Traefik 3.6.4"
...
dec 08 17:29:14 WaanzinsPC4 podman[219810]: 2025-12-08 17:29:14.792651264 +0100 CET m=+0.031000620 container health_status 2fd3f855d2d0732c7933467aebe060582240d4174394496a52d503257417af02 (image=docker.io/library/mariadb:11.4, name=dlfwiep-db, health_status=healthy, health_failing_streak=0, health_log=, io.podman.compose.config-hash=5d2e630559f2c3e21ef5c869bba425b12a24858e0b4287099674ef91b6ef1a96, org.opencontainers.image.base.name=docker.io/library/ubuntu:noble, org.opencontainers.image.documentation=https://hub.docker.com/_/mariadb/, org.opencontainers.image.url=https://github.com/MariaDB/mariadb-docker, PODMAN_SYSTEMD_UNIT=podman-compose@fwieplocal.service, com.docker.compose.project.working_dir=/home/fwiep/git/docker/localhost, io.podman.compose.project=fwieplocal, com.docker.compose.project=fwieplocal, org.opencontainers.image.version=11.4.9, org.opencontainers.image.source=https://github.com/MariaDB/mariadb-docker, org.opencontainers.image.authors=MariaDB Community, org.opencontainers.image.description=MariaDB Database for relational SQL, io.podman.compose.version=1.5.0, com.docker.compose.project.config_files=/home/fwiep/git/docker/localhost/docker-compose.yaml, io.podman.compose.service=dlfwiep-db, org.opencontainers.image.ref.name=ubuntu, org.opencontainers.image.title=MariaDB Database, com.docker.compose.container-number=1, org.opencontainers.image.licenses=GPL-2.0, org.opencontainers.image.vendor=MariaDB Community, com.docker.compose.service=dlfwiep-db)
dec 08 17:29:15 WaanzinsPC4 podman[219312]: @ - - [08/Dec/2025:17:29:15 +0100] "GET /v1.41/containers/json?all=1 HTTP/1.1" 200 5448 "" "Traefik 3.6.4"
dec 08 17:29:15 WaanzinsPC4 podman[219312]: @ - - [08/Dec/2025:17:29:15 +0100] "GET /v1.41/containers/90da98d7e4c36e6d096d701185199d99b2992fd04e5dd78f0149340a0269a98d/json HTTP/1.1" 200 7446 "" "Traefik 3.6.4"
dec 08 17:29:15 WaanzinsPC4 podman[219312]: @ - - [08/Dec/2025:17:29:15 +0100] "GET /v1.41/containers/2fd3f855d2d0732c7933467aebe060582240d4174394496a52d503257417af02/json HTTP/1.1" 200 8738 "" "Traefik 3.6.4"

Traefik’s access log is disabled, its regular logging is set to WARN, and directed into an on-disk file. Where do these lines in the syslog come from?

Thanks,
FWieP

4

It looks like they can be disabled by setting healthcheck_events = false in the [engine] section of containers.conf. For example:

# cat /etc/containers/containers.conf.d/custom.conf
[engine]
healthcheck_events = false

From man containers.conf:

healthcheck_events=true|false

Whenever Podman should log healthcheck events. With many running healthcheck on short interval Podman will spam the event log a lot as it generates a event for each single healthcheck run. Because this event is optional and only useful to external consumers that may want to know when a healthcheck is run or failed allow users to turn it off by setting it to false.

Default is true.

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