What is Chef?

With Chef, you write abstract definitions as source code to describe how you want each part of your infrastructure to be built, and then apply those descriptions to individual servers. The result is a fully automated infrastructure: when a new server comes online, the only thing you have to do is instruct Chef what role it should play in your architecture.

Now you can use Chef for deploying, updating and removing Monitis agent as well.

The following manual assumes that you already have configured, and are running, Chef infrastructure, so we will not discuss Chef installation and configuration procedures here, especially since it is wonderfully documented and easily referenced here !

The current version of Monitis Cookbook is tested on following operating systems:

- Debian 6.0.1 x86-64 bit

- Ubuntu 12.04 x86-64 bit

- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 x86-64 bit

- CentOS 6.2 x86-64 bit

- Fedora 17 x86-64 bit

- openSUSE 12.2 x86-64 bit

- Windows XP x86 bit

- Windows 7 x86-64 bit

- Windows Server 2003 64 bit

- Windows Server 2008 64 bit

There are 3 recipes:

install – Installs and configures Monitis monitoring Agent if not installed

update – Uninstalls and installs latest version of Monitis monitoring Agent

uninstall – Uninstalls Monitis monitoring Agent

Monitis cookbook installation is extremely easy and contains the following steps:

1. Installing from tarball

• Download the cookbook tarball

            wget https://github.com/monitisexchange/monitis-chef-deployment/archive/master.zip

• Extract the cookbook tarball.

unzip master.zip

• Copy cookbook to chef cookbook folder

            cp -r monitis-chef-deployment-master /var/chef/cookbooks/monitis

• Upload the cookbook to theChef Server. Use knife cookbook upload sub-command. There is no difference in its use for Open Source Chef Server, Hosted Chef or Private Chef.

knife cookbook upload monitis

2. Installing from GITHub

• Download the cookbook from here GITHub

            git clone git://github.com/monitisexchange/monitis-chef-deployment.git

• Upload the cookbook to theChef Server. Use knife cookbook upload sub-command. There is no difference in its use for Open Source Chef Server, Hosted Chef or Private Chef.

knife cookbook upload monitis

Now Monitis cookbook is installed and available in chef server, you can test and see it under the cookbooks section of chef WUI :

Before it can be used, you need to first set some attributes: installation directory and monitis username

You can set these attributes via Chef WUI, or by editing the cookbook template directly. If you have enough experience to edit cookbook, you probably won’t need to read this manual any more!

Below we illustrate how to configure Monitis agent using Chef WUI.

Setting Attributes

Attributes can be set in different levels:

1      Node level

2      Role Level

Generally you will not want to set attributes on node level, as you will then have to do this for every node separately. So we recommend always setting these attributes on Role level. (One for all)

For setting up attributes on Role level we will need :

Login to the Management Console and navigate to the Roles tab.

Click Create on the sub navigation bar.

Give the role a name and an optional description.

To add a recipe to the role, drag it from “Available Recipes” to “Run List”.

1. click “json” -> 2. “Default” from the “Default and Override Attributes” tree on the bottom left.

3. check “Autodetect type of attribute” checkbox

4. enter {“MONITIS”:{“USEREMAIL”:”YOUR_EMAIL@ADDRESS.com“,”PASSWORD”:”YOUR_MD5_PASSWORD”}}

5. click “Add Attribute”.

6) Click “Create Role” to save the new role.

Voila! You are set up and ready to use Monitis cookbook and from now on you can install Monitis agent on thousands of hosts using a single click.