[chef] Re: Monitoring knife-lastrun?

[Steffen Gebert < >]

Thanks kallen, that was an excellent starting point!

I've never used zabbix_sender, but - of course - it's absolutely the right 
tool for this job!

I managed to write a handler that reports execution times and status of 
chef-client runs to zabbix:
https://github.com/StephenKing/chef-zabbix-custom-checks/blob/master/templates/default/chef-client/chef-client-handler.rb

Just a question: Do you log more than plain numbers? (exception stack trace, 
updated resources etc?). Found nothing out, how to log multiple lines.

Nevertheless, thanks a lot for your help!

Steffen


On 10.06.2012, at 08:07, 

 
 wrote:

> On Sat, 09 Jun 2012, Steffen Gebert wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> thanks for your quick replies!
>> 
>> I'm unsure, whether knife-lastrun is a perfect start. The optimum solution 
>> would be, if it wouldn't only save to node data, but also to write results 
>> into files. I would then pick these up through zabbix agent.
>> 
>> Do you know some report handler that does already exactly this?
> 
> 
> hi. we use zabbix where i work. from each node i'm reporting the chef-client
> status to zabbux using zabbix-sender from a chef report handler. i based my
> code on this gentleman's handler:
> 
> https://github.com/ranjibd/nsca_handler/blob/master/nsca_handler.rb
> 
> i modified it to fit zabbix bits. when the client node sends its status,
> 0 good, non-zero bad, it does basically:
> 
> zabbix-sender_binary -s host001 -c /etc/zabbix.conf -z 
> zabbix-server.foo.com -k chef_client[status] -o $CHEF_CLIENT_EXIT_STATUS 
> 
> on the zabbix server i also do a freshness check. if the server hasn't heard
> from a client in X period, alert.
> 
> HTH,
> kallen
> 
> 
> 
>> @Tetsu
>> I read about Grill and also the other dashboard here in the lists. But I 
>> prefer to have it integrated in our existing monitoring.
>> 
>> Thanks
>> Steffen
>> 
>> On 09.06.2012, at 18:50, Daniel Schauenberg wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi,
>>> 
>>> wouldn't report and exception handlers be the better choice here? Sounds 
>>> like using knife lastrun is just adding complexity?
>>> 
>>> Cheers,
>>> Daniel
>>> 
>>> On Jun 9, 2012, at 12:45 PM, Tetsu Soh wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Hi,
>>>> 
>>>> May be different from what you are asking, we are using Grill to monitor 
>>>> Chef run status.
>>>> It has a good GUI with alter and report feature and very easy to setup.
>>>> 
>>>> You can get a trial version to try Grill out.
>>>> 
>>>> Regards,
>>>> 
>>>> Tetsu
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> On 6/10/12 1:17 AM, Steffen Gebert wrote:
>>>>> Hi,
>>>>> 
>>>>> I want to monitor the output of knife-lastrun (to check execution time 
>>>>> + failed runs).
>>>>> 
>>>>> Is anyone of you already doing this (we're using Zabbix, but I would 
>>>>> say this fact doesn't matter..).
>>>>> 
>>>>> Do you see any other way than:
>>>>> *) give the client on our monitoring station chef admin privileges to 
>>>>> retrieve the values via knife (<- bad idea..)
>>>>> *) modify the knife-lastrun gem to write stats into a local file 
>>>>> (however I have no clue, how to do this - I'm not a ruby guy :().
>>>>> *) or does knife-lastrun already write stats to a local file? However 
>>>>> the code looks like it only writes to log and saves to the node.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Would be nice, if someone could help me!
>>>>> 
>>>>> Yours
>>>>> Steffen
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>