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Sondar

Air-gapped install

Sondar runs with no route to the internet. The server, the UI, the agent installers and the app catalog are all in the one image, and none of them calls out. This page covers moving the image in, and the two things that do need a connection.

Move the image in

Section titled “Move the image in”

On a machine that has the image, write it to a file:

Terminal window
docker save sondar:<tag> | gzip > sondar-<tag>.tar.gz

Carry the file across, then on the air-gapped host:

Terminal window
docker load < sondar-<tag>.tar.gz

Then start it exactly as Getting started describes — including raising vm.max_map_count on a Linux host, which an air-gapped server usually is. The image is about 916 MB on disk, and the compressed file about 600 MB (measured on a September 2026 build).

For Kubernetes, either push the loaded image to a registry inside your network and set the Helm chart’s global.repository to it (the default, sondardev, means Docker Hub), or load the image onto each node directly. The chart pulls with IfNotPresent, so an image already on a node is used as it is.

What reaches out: nothing

Section titled “What reaches out: nothing”

The server. A server started on a Docker network with no route out (docker network create --internal) boots and answers /api/v1/readyz. In the five minutes afterwards its log holds no name-resolution or connection failures. Usage telemetry is off unless you configure an endpoint, and the log says so at startup:

Ping task not started: sondar.ping.task.url is not set. No telemetry is sent.

That run also used the production self-check (sondar.environment=k8s), which verifies every shipped file against the release signature before starting. The check is local: the public key is in the server, so it needs no network.

The browser. Every page is served with a Content-Security-Policy of default-src 'self'. The browser will not load a script, style, image, font or API call from anywhere except the Sondar server itself. Loading eight main screens (Home, Search, Dashboards, APM, Metrics, Kubernetes, Users, Agents) fetched 114–167 resources each, and none of them came from another origin.

Agents. The install command the UI generates downloads the installer script and the agent package from your Sondar server, not from the internet. The only web addresses in the installer scripts are the website address printed in their banner. See Agent and machines.

Apps. Every app in the catalog ships inside the image, so installing one needs no download.

Maps. Map charts draw on vector tiles that ship with the product, for zoom levels 0–5. Past zoom 5 the base map is scaled up rather than fetched, so it gets coarser instead of disappearing. There is no street-level base map, online or off.

What needs a connection

Section titled “What needs a connection”
  • The help links. The product’s help links open this handbook at docs.sondar.dev. Without internet access they will not load. The handbook is a static site, so a copy can be hosted inside your network, but the in-product links still point at docs.sondar.dev.
  • Anything you send data to. Notification channels (email, webhooks, chat) and exports deliver to the addresses you give them. Inside an air gap those have to be systems inside it too — your mail relay, your own webhook receiver.