Zabbix Server for Orange Boxes

A bit of background

There is a very neat system at Canonical called Orange Box that is basically a datacenter-in-a-box. It is used to make demos on the field and to test deployments of OpenStack, Hadoop or any other workload that has been charmed to be compliant with Juju, a service orchestration solution.

This monitoring solution based on Zabbix aims at providing a replicate of an industrial-grade NMS at the scale of an Orange Box so that:

• The Orange Box itself gets monitored properly and reports hardware or software issues
• Workloads deployed via Juju can get real life monitoring to make demos more vivid.

Usage

Installation

Create a VM on the Orange Box (in fact you can use ANY VM if you just need monitoring of juju deployed workloads. I use an AWS VM for testing and monitoring workloads). There are no specific requirements other than having a disk larger than 8GB. I personally recommend having at least 2 cores and 2GB of RAM if you plan on scaling a bit.

After you login to the machine, update the below to your username and copy paste to a terminal

export USERNAME=ubuntu
cd /home/${USERNAME}
git clone https://github.com/SaMnCo/ob-zabbix.git
cd ob-zabbix
chmod +x *.sh
# Here you may edit install-zabbix-server.sh to select another default database depending on your workload
sudo ./install-zabbix-server.sh
# This will install the server based on MySQL on this machine with the default settings. 
# By default, no workload is pre-installed and this is a "blank" OB monitoring solution. 
sudo ./install-zabbix-agent.sh
# This will install a Zabbix Agent locally as well, pointing on the localhost server so you can actively monitor at least this node. 

Configuration

OK now you may start login on http://this-vm/zabbix with default credentials admin:ubuntu

First thing you want to do is activate all auto-discovery in Configuration/Discovery. Then you should be OK for starters

Now you also need to know that there are 2 configuration files hidden for the Zabbix and Juju apis.

• /usr/lib/zabbix/externalscripts/.jujuapi.yaml: you must modify that one with your Juju environment settings (those are actually the juju-gui access credentials)
• /usr/lib/zabbix/externalscripts/.zabbixapi.yaml: localhost should be OK as-is but if you want to run a remote instance or if you changed the Zabbix credentials, you'll have to update those.

Adding workloads

Connect on the Zabbix node and use the following commands:

sudo service zabbix-server stop
sudo service zabbix-agent stop
cd /home/${USERNAME}/ob-zabbix
mysql -uroot -pubuntu zabbix < zabbix_clearwater.sql
sudo service zabbix-server start
sudo service zabbix-agent start

Features

Note: the project is very early stage and focused for now on an actual Juju workload. More will come for the OB itself later on.

Orange Box

Networking

• Auto discovery and removal of hardware cluster nodes via AMT monitoring
• Auto discovery of ** OpenStack Neutron public IPs range ** MAAS managed DHCP
• Fake intrusion detection on ranges where nobody should be

Monitoring

• Simple template for all nodes with auto activation when they pop up

Workloads

Clearwater

• SNMP Templates of all Clearwater nodes
• Active Agent Templates of all Clearwater nodes
• Autoscaling of Clearwater with auto-deletion of nodes in Zabbix when they go down

To make this work, you need to use https://github.com/SaMnCo/charm-zabbix-agent as a subordinate charm to your juju bundle. This is still experimental hence the "not in the charmstore yet".

export USERNAME=ubuntu
cd /home/${USERNAME}
mkdir -p localcharms/precise localcharms/trusty 
cd localcharms/precise
git clone https://github.com/SaMnCo/charm-zabbix-agent zabbix-agent
cd zabbix-agent
git checkout precise
cd ../trusty
git clone https://github.com/SaMnCo/charm-zabbix-agent zabbix-agent
cd zabbix-agent
git checkout trusty
cd ../..
# We assume you have a Juju environment bootstraped
juju quickstart clearwater/bundle.yaml # this assumes you have the bundle or you deploy through the GUI
juju deploy --repository=/home/${USERNAME}/localcharms local:precise/zabbix-agent 
# Wait until the agent is deployed and configure the server URL to point on your zabbix
juju add-relation zabbix-agent clearwater-sprout
juju add-relation zabbix-agent clearwater-bono
juju add-relation zabbix-agent clearwater-ralf
juju add-relation zabbix-agent clearwater-homer
juju add-relation zabbix-agent clearwater-homestead
juju add-relation zabbix-agent clearwater-ellis
juju add-relation zabbix-agent dns

Enjoy your nodes automagically enrolled in Zabbix.

Wanna test autoscaling?

juju ssh clearwater-bono/0
sudo apt-get install -y -qq stress
stress --cpu 1 --io 2 --vm 2 --vm-bytes 512M --timeout 600

Telscale Restcomm

• Simple group CPU load
• Autoscaling of Clearwater with auto-deletion of nodes in Zabbix when they go down

Conclusion

More to come! Let's play!!