I have a bunch of TeamCity agents (Windows, Linux, AWS, OpenShift). To have consistent state it is desirable that all of them have the same software+version installed. Manually checking them is very tedious
Hence I have decided to have an application which shows this information as a dashboard, i.e. a snapshot view of all the agents and the software installed on them. I have decided to use Python(v3.6) for the implementation. I am not a hardcore developer hence this will be learn and do project for me.
I was thinking of some sort of a code-base on all agents that would fetch the necessary details for that agent only.
I will then have a central server that will utilize this data from each agent and then display it in the form of a dashboard.
Please let me know if the above design is the proper way of doing it or please suggest some alternate if any.
If I can have some pointers as how to go about implementing it that would be of great help.
If you have full control over the agents' machines, consider using Ansible to enforce the desired configurations. In general it is much more convenient an safe to control agents' configurations rather than ask them if they have proper ones. And with Ansible or similar configuration management tool you can do this in a scalable way.
Related
I've googled this and searched for answers here but either cannot find it or I'm making this too complicated in my head.
This is the situation: There are two machines, A and B. Both of them install a binary.
Machine A will have to run a script once the binary is installed on machine B, not before.
This is the first step but all other steps are similar, there is a dependency on the other machine.
I can't seem to find a way to do this in puppet. Can someone put me on the right track please?
Thank you
You're describing an orchestration problem, and Puppet itself is not intended or built for such problems. Puppet, Inc. offers an Orchestrator product bundled with the professional edition of the software, and that would be your best bet if it is available to you. Alternatively, previous versions of Puppet used MCollective, which should be available to you even if you're using open-source Puppet.
If there were just one such interaction between the machines in question then it might make sense to hack together some orchestration with Puppet itself -- it is possible. But you seem to be saying that you have multiple points where the two machines need to synchronize, and I really can't recommend trying to build that out with Puppet. If you could, say, fully configure machine B before configuring A, so that there is only one synchronization point, then that might be a different story.
I am looking to create a simple mobile agent system which will deal with 4 tasks, i.e 4 different mobile agents jobs: Database update, meeting scheduling, network services discovery and kernel update.
I have done my research and have seen different frameworks such as Aglet, Jade, agent builder etc. My question is which one should i use? Also i need to setup the base code for it to work, can someone point me to a site or help me to setup the basic functions of the mobile agent?
I've read about tahiti server for the Aglet model. I'm quite confused about how to set up the mobile agent system. Any help would be much appreciated.
I have also tried to it using RMI. I had created a method of type agent, but i couldn't pass it through remote method implementation. I was reading about tcp and udp socket programming. I was thinking may be it would be more fair to do it using socket programming. In this case, would this be called an agent? I was thinking about the server sending datagram packets to multiple clients.
You need to ask yourself why you want to use mobile agents at all. The notion of a mobile agent was popular in the agent research community in the early 90's, but fell out of favour because (i) it wasn't clear what problem it was solving, (ii) the capability to allow arbitrary code to migrate to a particular computer and execute with enough privileges to access local data and services is very open to abuse, and (iii) all of the claimed benefits of mobile agents can actually be achieved though web services (REST or otherwise) and open data formats such as RDF. Consequently, few, if any, mobile agent platforms have been properly maintained since the early experiments.
It also sounds as though you need to be clear which end-user problem you want to solve. Scheduling a meeting and updating my kernel are very different tasks - I'd be very uncomfortable with a program that claims do both. If your interest is in the automation of system maintenance tasks, such as DB tuning and kernel patching, on large networks you might want to look at the SmartFrog project, or read up on autonomic computing.
I use JADE and I agree with the first guy, agent systems usually take alot of overhead to going so if you can avoid it, please do. If however you choose to proceed choose a platform with alot of support and a big user group.
Jade has some neat features like a directory facilitator DF, which works like a yellow pages so other agents don't have to know what agents are running and what services are supplied they can simply inquire by the DF.
Also JADE ContractNetBehaviours help simplify communication.
What I am looking specifically for is software thats runs on Linux (CentOS) that can do the following:
Show human readable CPU, Memory, Disk, Apache, MySQL utilization/performance.
Provide historic reports on the above metrics (today, week, month, year etc...)
Provide this data in an easy to view web based report or at least exportable to excel/csv.
I have looked at Cacti and I don't think its really an enterprise solution. I don't care if this is free or paid for software, though open source would be nice I am really just looking for the best solution.
Does anything like this exist for Linux? The problem this company is faced with is we have no way of measuring how the changes we make in our code and server configurations impact overall performance. So when I saw lets do this - then do it, I can't shows the benefits or revert back cause it was a negative in terms of performance. I am not a linux guru, just a developer with some linux skills, but am open to all suggestions. Thanks for reading.
Even though there are lot of open source projects but the main drawback they suffer is that they are away harder to configure. I have some across a free to called SeaLion which is way easier to install and configure. And it has awesome timeline base to representing outputs. Also there are different paid tools line new relic, server density, solar wind which you can also give a look.
Check out the eginnovations monitoring tool
http://www.eginnovations.com
Monitors Linux, Apache, mySQL and other applications and is web-based, so you dont have to be a linux expert.
M.
Cacti is a simple one. OpenNMS is more complete.
You are not limited to linux, using SNMP you can fetch this data from a remote host and use any NMS you like.
IMHO one of the best "freemium" tools is Zenoss (http://community.zenoss.org/).
The community edition is free. It will do everything you need, and comes with a simple RPM based installation process. It's a lot easier than Cacti or Nagios to setup and use. I would give it a try.
I use munin. I'ts much much simpler to set up than cacti. It's better to compile it yourself than pull it with apt-get (or other) because that way it has more built-in data-gathering scripts.
Basically there is no single dashboard where you can get all reports metrics. There are a range of opensource softwares which and can serve your need.
For server performance many people recommends munin, you will have to learn how to read teh report data. You can also write custom scripts to get certain report parameters of Mysql. Additionally if your server host provides an API, you can then do lot more related to reports in your admin panel.
you have a look at following url which can provide you more idea about choosing best fit to your need.
https://serverfault.com/questions/44/what-tool-do-you-use-to-monitor-your-servers
http://sixrevisions.com/tools/10-free-server-network-monitoring-tools-that-kick-ass/
I have a number of Windows servers at work that are used for staging web sites for clients while they are being created.
I wanted to start using versioning on them so that when we work with outside vendors on a project, if/when they overwrite my work, I'd like to be able to go back and get the version before.
My question is that I think I'm not looking for the correct terms in searching for information, but what kind of resources are there to learn how to install the software for versioning or a site to help me get started.
Any and all suggestions would be appreciated.
Steph
Since your development workflow can be decentralized (as in "there isn't always one central repository), DVCS tools, with their common tasks described here) can be more adapted.
Git-Scm
Mercurial (see HgInit.com for a very good tutorial like the kind you are after)
Plastic SCM (which has a DVCS nature)
I need a software to manage configurations of linux servers in one central location. It should be able to push changes to servers automaticly. Version control would be an advantage...
I've heard good things about Puppet (as matli suggested) and Cfengine, which are both listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_configuration_management_software
Have a look at Puppet
There's also Chef and bcfg2. If you're a Java guy, Control Tier is nice. There are some new projects in the python space to address the issue as well: Kokki, Overmind, Edison.
They all do essentially the same thing just in different ways. If you're a ruby developer, Chef is going to feel VERY familiar. If you aren't a developer and don't care about the language, puppet, while written in Ruby, abstracts it all out into a DSL.
Checkout Bluepring and Blueprint I/O. Blueprint is an open-source tool for figuring out what's been done to a server. Packages, file modifications and source installs are detected and packaged up in a reusable formtat - a blueprint. Blueprint I/O is a tools for moving blueprints to another server. Together, they make for a drop dead simple configuration management tool. Hope this helps.
https://github.com/devstructure/blueprint (Blueprint # Github)
https://github.com/devstructure/blueprint-io (Blueprint I/O # Github)
Old question, but still might be helpful to you: We are releasing ConfigChief, a hosted central configuration repository with versioning, audit, access control which turns the problem around by pulling configuration from the server rather than pushing it which is the solution provided by Puppet and the rest.
You can signup for a beta at http://woot.configchief.com if you like.