README.md

ℹ️  SignalFx was acquired by Splunk in October 2019. See Splunk SignalFx for more information.

SignalFx Agent BOSH Release

This is a BOSH release of the SignalFx collectd agent. It uses a self-contained bundle of collectd to run.

Configuration

Properties for the signalfx-agent job contained in this release are specified in the job spec file along with descriptions.

There are two ways to configure the collectd agent: 1) putting config files in the src/signalfx-collectd/managed_config directory; or 2) by specifying the config file as a heredoc for the collectd_config property in your deployment manifest. The first method is useful if you want to create a custom re-usable release and the second is good for quick config of the default agent.

Method 1: src/signalfx-collectd/managed_config Dir

To add collectd configuration files, simply add them to the dir src/signalfx-collectd/managed_config and generate a new release. This release will include these files. This method is not very flexible since the config files are all static and a new release must be generated for each combination of services monitored. It is most useful for making a new base release.

Method 2: Deployment YAML Property

You can also add a property to the signalfx-agent job in your deployment manifest called collectd_configs. This should be the contents of all of the custom collectd config files concatenated together as a heredoc. These will be added to the managed_config dir that collectd reads config from.

Example:

...
instance_groups:
- name: agent-with-redis
  jobs:
  - name: signalfx-agent
    release: signalfx-agent
    properties:
      access_token: abc123
      collectd_configs: |
        <LoadPlugin python>
          Globals true
        </LoadPlugin>

        <Plugin python>
          ModulePath "/usr/share/collectd/redis"
          Import "redis_info"

          <Module redis_info>
            Host "localhost"
            Port 6379
            Auth "password"
            Redis_uptime_in_seconds "gauge"
          </Module>
        </Plugin>
...

This is more flexible although it still requires you to hardcode certain config options like passwords. BOSH variables are one way to deal with this more effectively.

Collectd Plugins

This release includes most of our Python plugins installed to the BOSH package dir /var/vcap/packages/signalfx-collectd/plugins/<integration name>, so make sure to use this directory when specifying ModulePath when configuring Python plugins. The Import statement will be the same as example config files, as well as the <Module> tags. For example, the Elasticsearch plugin is installed at /var/vcap/packages/signalfx-collectd/plugins/elasticsearch, so its config file would look like:

<LoadPlugin "python">
    Globals true
</LoadPlugin>

<Plugin "python">
    ModulePath "/var/vcap/packages/signalfx-collectd/plugins/elasticsearch"

    Import "elasticsearch_collectd"

    <Module "elasticsearch_collectd">
	   ....
    </Module>
</Plugin>

TODO

• Automatically discover services to monitor via BOSH links. BOSH links are available as an array in the ERB job templates as @links.

Dev Setup

To modify the release:

• Install the BOSH CLI tool 2+
• Install BOSH-Lite -- you don't need to deploy Cloud Foundry to it
• Run bosh alias-env bosh-lite -e 192.168.50.4 --ca-cert=<BOSH_LITE_DIR>/ca/certs/ca.crt -- changing <BOSH_LITE_DIR> to the dir that you cloned the bosh-lite repo to.
• Download cloud.yml in this gist and save it to /tmp/cloud.yml.
• Run bosh -e bosh-lite ucc /tmp/cloud.yml to set your cloud config for BOSH.
• Make changes to this repo.
• Run make bosh-dev-release to test on bosh-lite.