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 on Linux) 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 (Linux);
\\ProgramData\SignalFxAgent\agent.yaml (Windows))

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.
Note that Windows packages are just equivalent to the agent version right now.

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/signalfx-metadata"},
    {type: "collectd/vmem"}
    {type: "host-metadata"},
  ],
  "metricsToExclude": [
    {"#from": "/usr/lib/signalfx-agent/lib/whitelist.json", "flatten": true}
  ]
}

Windows

This cookbook should work on Windows as well. Note that we have come across
some issues with Python having a side-by-side manifest issue at times. If this
is the case, make sure you have installed the Microsoft Visual C++ Compiler
for Python 2.7 first.

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.