SignalFx Agent Cookbook

This cookbook installs and configures the SignalFx Agent.

To install the agent, simply include the signalfx_agent::default recipe. We recommend pinning the agent to a specific version by setting the node['signalfx_agent']['package_version'] attribute. We will keep all old versions in the repos.

The cookbook tries to be as flexible as possible with the configuration of the agent and does not impose any agent configuration policy. The default config file (/etc/signalfx/agent.yaml) that comes from the package will be overwritten with what you provide in the node['signalfx_agent']['conf'] object.

Attributes

node['signalfx_agent']['conf_file_path']: The path where the agent config will be rendered (default: /etc/signalfx/agent.yaml)

node['signalfx_agent']['package_version']: The agent package version. This is of the form <agent version>-<package revision> (e.g. package version 3.0.1-1 is the first package revision that contains the agent version 3.0.1). Releases with package revision > 1 contain changes to some aspect of the packaging scripts (e.g. init scripts) but contain the same agent bundle.

node['signalfx_agent']['package_stage']: The package repository to use. Can be final (default, for main releases), beta (for beta releases), or test (for unsigned test releases).

node['signalfx_agent']['conf']: Agent configuration object. Everything underneath this object gets directly converted to YAML and becomes the agent config file. See the Agent Config Schema for a full list of acceptable options. The only required option is signalFxAccessToken. Here is a basic config that will monitor a basic set of host-level components:

node['signalfx_agent']['conf'] = {
  signalFxAccessToken: "MY_TOKEN",
  monitors: [
    {type: "collectd/cpu"},
    {type: "collectd/cpufreq"},
    {type: "collectd/df"},
    {type: "collectd/disk"},
    {type: "collectd/interface"},
    {type: "collectd/load"},
    {type: "collectd/memory"},
    {type: "collectd/protocols"},
    {type: "collectd/signalfx-metadata"},
    {type: "host-metadata"},
    {type: "collectd/uptime"},
    {type: "collectd/vmem"}
  ]
}

Development

To test this cookbook in the dev image (which is Ubuntu-based, so this won't be able to test non-Debian packaging):

chef-client -z -o 'recipe[signalfx_agent::default]' -j cookbooks/signalfx_agent/example_attrs.json

When testing on a remote machine, put the contents of this directory into a directory cookbooks/signalfx_agent located anywhere in the filesystem, create a json attribute file with the desired attributes (see example_attrs.json for an example), and then invoke chef-client as you would in the dev image.

Release Process

To release a new version of the cookbook, run ./release in this directory. You will need to have our Chef Supermarket server knife.rb and the signalfx.pem private key in ~/.chef, which you can obtain from somebody else on the project who has it.

You should update the version in metadata.rb to whatever is most appropriate for semver and have that committed before running ./release.

The release script will try to make and push an annotated tag of the form chef-vX.Y.Z where X.Y.Z is the version in the ./metadata.rb file.