Pixel

Pixel is an open source network monitoring project maintained by @floored1585.

Pixel uses SNMP to monitor network equipment. The API endpoint and user interface is designed to scale horizontally behind a load balancer. Nodes can also be configured as dedicated pollers, only interacting with the rest of the application via API calls. This allows the application to scale extremely well as long as the database server is properly tuned. A Pixel deployment can be scaled down to a single VM running Pixel (poller and core), PostgreSQL, InfluxDB and Grafana, or can be widely distributed with multiple instances of each component.

This project is severely lacking documentation at the moment, and the test suite will fail miserably outside of a specifically crafted environment. These are things that need work!

Please join us in #pixel on Freenode if you have any questions, we'd be glad to help!

Installation

• Baseline a Linux machine with pixel-cookbook, or take the steps in the default recipe manually (not recommended -- the cookbook does a lot of stuff).
• Install and configure a PostgreSQL (>= 9.4 important) database and user either locally or on a different machine.
  • Create a database for Pixel: sudo -u postgres psql -c 'CREATE DATABASE pixel'
  • Set a password for the postgres database user (sudo -u postgres psql -c "ALTER USER postgres PASSWORD 'password'"), or create your own user.
  • Pixel will generate the database schema when it detects an empty database.
• Install InfluxDB >= 0.9 either locally or on a different machine.
  • Create an InfluxDB database for Pixel by running influx and then CREATE DATABASE pixel.
• Deploy Pixel (OPTION #1 - automatically using Capistrano and the provided config/deploy.rb)
  • In your deploy environment, make sure that the authorized_keys you used with pixel-cookbook has a matching pixel_rsa file in your home folder (required for Capistrano to do its thing)
  • Use Capistrano and the provided deploy.rb. This takes care of everything done in Option #2 automatically.
• Deploy Pixel (OPTION #2 - manually, using the following commands)
  • sudo su - pixel
  • git clone https://github.com/floored1585/pixel.git /var/www/pixel/current
  • ln -s /var/www/pixel/shared/config/hosts.yaml /var/www/pixel/current/config/hosts.yaml
  • ln -s /var/www/pixel/shared/config/config.yaml /var/www/pixel/current/config/config.yaml
  • ln -s /var/www/pixel/shared/log/messages.log /var/www/pixel/current/messages.log
  • cd /var/www/pixel/current
  • bundle install
  • bower install
  • mkdir tmp
• Finish the deployment
  • Modify /var/www/pixel/shared/config/config.yaml if necessary (database connectivity and application URL)
  • Restart Apache/Passenger with service apache2 restart. This may not be necessary.
  • Force Pixel to initialize: curl -s -D - http://127.0.0.1:80/v2/wakeup -o /dev/null
  • Modify the global_config database table as appropriate after Pixel has started.
• Install Grafana either locally or on a different machine.
  • Create symlinks to Pixel's scripted dashboards with the following commands:
  • ln -s /var/www/pixel/current/grafana/device.js /usr/share/grafana/public/dashboards/device.js
  • ln -s /var/www/pixel/current/grafana/interface.js /usr/share/grafana/public/dashboards/interface.js
  • Create a default InfluxDB datasource in Grafana that points to your InfluxDB installation.

Adding Devices

There is currently only one way of adding devices:

You must first configure the list of devices (and IPs) that Pixel should monitor in config/hosts.yaml (see config/hosts.example.yaml for formatting example).

Once you have valid YAML with devices and IPs, run curl http://127.0.0.1/v2/devices/populate on the application server (or visit that URL in a browser). This will update Pixel's database to match your hosts.yaml (it will add new devices and remove devices no longer present in hosts.yaml).

Over time additional methods of adding devices will be included.

Configuration

There is currently no UI method for configuring Pixel. Please take a look at the global_config table in the PostgreSQL database. This is currently where all the options live.

Logs / Troubleshooting

Pixel is very much a work in progress at this point in time, so you may run into problems. Application log data is written to the messages.log file at the application root, and the Apache error log will likely contain useful information if you are running into error messages.

Contributing

Any form of contribution is welcome! Feature requests, bug reports, pull requests, whatever! If you add features, make sure there are tests for them, and if you change any code, make sure the existing tests all pass before creating a pull request. NOTE: Tests currently are not in the repository due to a number of issues (security and portability mostly). I apologize -- fixing this is one of my top priorities.

License

This project is licensed under the GNU Affero GPL 3.0 License