Installing and Managing Sensu with Puppet

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- 4 minutes read - 656 words

As promised in the previous post, I thought I would share my Sensu/Puppet config. This is based on the Puppet infrastucture I decribed here so everything goes into Hiera.

For reasons best known to me (or my DHCP server) my Sensu host is on 192.168.1.108.

First your Puppetfile tells R10k to install the Sensu module, plus a few more:

mod 'nanliu/staging'
mod 'puppetlabs/rabbitmq'
mod 'sensu/sensu'

mod 'redis',
:git => 'https://github.com/chriscowley/chriscowley-redis.git',
:commit => '208c01aaf2435839ada26d3f7187ca80517fa2a8

I tend to put my classes and their parameters in Hiera. My hieradata/common.yaml contains:

---
classes:
- rabbitmq
- redis
- sensu
rabbitmq::port: '5672'
sensu::install_repo: true
sensu::purge_config: true
sensu::rabbitmq_host: 192.168.1.108
sensu::rabbitmq_password: password
sensu::rabbitmq_port: 5672
sensu::rabbitmq_vhost: '/sensu'
sensu::use_embedded_ruby: true
sensu::subscriptions:
  - base

This will do all the configuration for all your nodes. More specifically:

  • tells RabbitMQ to communicate on 5672/TCP
  • Installs Sensu from their own repo
  • All Sensu config will be controlled by Puppet
  • Configures the Sensu client:
  • RabbitMQ host is 192.168.1.108
  • password is password
  • RabbitMQ server is listening on 5672/TCP
  • RabbitMQ vhost is /sensu
  • Run plugins using Ruby embedded with Sensu, not system. This comes with the sensu-plugins gem which is required by any community plugins.
  • Subscribe to the base set of plugins

Next up, to configure your master, ensure that hieradata/nodes/monitor.whatever.com.yaml contains:

---
classes:
sensu::server: true
sensu::api: true

This does not do everything though. All we have done here is install and enable the Sensu server and API. Unfortunately, I have not really settled on a good way of getting defined types into Hiera, so now we jump into manifests/site.pp.

node default inherits basenode {
  package { 'wget':
    ensure => installed,
  }
  package { 'bind-utils':
    ensure => installed,
  }
  file { '/opt/sensu-plugins':
    ensure => directory,
    require => Package['wget']
  }
  staging::deploy { 'sensu-community-plugins.tar.gz':
    source => 'https://github.com/sensu/sensu-community-plugins/archive/master.tar.gz',
    target => '/opt/sensu-plugins',
    require => File['/opt/sensu-plugins'],
  }
  sensu::handler { 'default':
    command => 'mail -s \'sensu alert\' [email protected]',
  }
  sensu::check { 'check_cron':
    command => '/opt/sensu-plugins/sensu-community-plugins-master/plugins/processes/check-procs.rb -p crond -C   1',
    handlers => 'default',
    subscribers => 'base',
    require => Staging::Deploy['sensu-community-plugins.tar.gz'],
  }
  sensu::check { 'check_dns':
    command => '/opt/sensu-plugins/sensu-community-plugins-master/plugins/dns/check-dns.rb -d google-public-dns-a.google.com -s 192.168.1.2 -r 8.8.8.8',
    handlers => 'default',
    subscribers => 'base',
    require => Staging::Deploy['sensu-community-plugins.tar.gz'],
  }
  sensu::check { 'check_disk':
    command => '/opt/sensu-plugins/sensu-community-plugins-master/plugins/system/check-disk.rb',
    handlers => 'default',
    subscribers => 'base',
    require => Staging::Deploy['sensu-community-plugins.tar.gz'],
  }
}

This actually does quite a lot (halleluiah for CM). Each host will get:

- Ensures `wget` is installed and that a directory exists to hold the plugins
- Deploys those plugins, and follows HEAD. Do not do this in production - change the URL to use a particular commit/tag/whatever.
- Configures a simple handler to email alerts.
- Finally we configure a few basic plugins
   - check `crond` is running
   - Check name resolution works by looking up Google's public DNS server
   - Check disk space

Finally, the Sensu server needs RabbitMQ configured:

node 'monitor.whatever.com' inherits default {
  rabbitmq_user { 'sensu':
    admin => false,
    password => 'password',
  }
  rabbitmq_vhost { '/sensu':
    ensure => present,
  }
}

If you use Puppet agent with its defaults everything should now kind of pull together over the next hour.

One final stage is to have some way of visualising your Sensu data. There is a great dashboard called Uchiwa for that. In the monitor.whatever.com node in manifests/site.pp add:

$uchiwa_api_config = [{
  host    => 'monitor.whatever.lan',
  name    => 'Site 1',
  port    => '4567',
  timeout => '5',
}]

class { 'uchiwa':
  install_repo        => false,
  sensu_api_endpoints => $uchiwa_api_config,
  user                => 'admin',
  pass                => 'secret',
}

You could put this anywhere, but the Sensu host is as pretty logical place to my mind.

I am not 100% happy with this, particularly some of the dependency (packages and folders) is quite messy. It is fine for now as my lab is very much centred around CentOS. I do have some projects on the todo list for which I may use Debian/Ubuntu. As such I will be breaking a lot of that out into a localdata module. I'll post details about how I do that when I get round to it.

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