[chef] Re: chef-client and error handlers

[Ranjib Dey < >]

we use hipchat for immediate notification when chef run fails. and the dd plugins,  to create fine grained alerts.

we have written blender to automate the push/coordination needs, for on demand we use the ssh driver , and for periodic fleetwide run we use serf backend (scales way better than ssh),

I'll recommend  to use the hipchat or dd or any other error handler irrespective of the push workflow bit,

[0]https://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/65276-chef-integration

[1]https://github.com/PagerDuty/blender

[2]https://github.com/PagerDuty/blender-chef

On Mon, Mar 23, 2015 at 4:43 AM, michael david mosier < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Thank you everyone for helping me  with naming conventions.

I have another question. Again I am fairly new to this so I may have just not learned how this works yet.


If someone has 1000 nodes. Going to each machine and running chef-client doesn't feel like it's the best way to do things. I know on the enterprise side they have a push type plugin. I also know with knife I can force a push to all the nodes. The problem I see with this is you may need to write an error handler into a recipe so you will know that something that was just updated on the node errored out. If your on each machine you can see on the screen if it errored out when you run chef-client but remotely I am not sure how to handle catching errors. I was thinking since there are two built in error handlers maybe I could write a script that would email me whenever an error occurs but that may mean that each node has to have send-mail running.

1. How do you all deal with updating multiple nodes without SSHing to each and running chef-client

2. How do you all deal with error  handling.

Thank yo so much

Michael D. Mosier
Systems Guy
University Of Texas
Astro Physics