Learn about the Chef Integration.

Chef Integration

Chef is a configuration management tool written in Ruby and Erlang. This integration installs and configures Telegraf to send Chef metrics into Wavefront. Telegraf is a light-weight server process capable of collecting, processing, aggregating, and sending metrics to a Wavefront proxy.

In addition to setting up the metrics flow, this integration also installs a dashboard. Here’s a section of a dashboard displaying Chef metrics:

images/chef_dashboard.png

To see a list of the metrics for this integration, select the integration from https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf/tree/master/plugins/inputs.

Chef Setup

This integration uses Telegraf’s Exec input plugin to fetch the metrics from Chef and push them to Wavefront.

Step 1: Install the Telegraf Agent

Log in to your product instance and follow the instructions on the Setup tab to install Telegraf and a Wavefront proxy in your environment. If a proxy is already running in your environment, you can select that proxy and the Telegraf install command connects with that proxy. Sign up for a free trial to check it out!

Step 2: Download the Script

  1. Install the Reporting server on Chef server using the below commands: 
    chef-server-ctl install opscode-reporting
chef-server-ctl reconfigure
opscode-reporting-ctl reconfigure
  2. Download chef-metrics-collector onto your Chef server, and place it in an accessible location, for example /etc/telegraf/.chef
  3. Keep the private key of the Chef user in a file in an accessible location, for example /etc/telegraf/.chef/admin.pem
  4. Create the file knife.rb on your Chef server with the following configuration settings for your environment, and place it in an accessible location, for example /etc/telegraf/.chef 
    # Sample for chef_server_url is: "https://chef.wavefront.com/organizations/bu"
chef_server_url          << Chef Server Url >>
# Sample for node_name is: "admin"
node_name                << Node Name >>
# Sample for client_name is: "admin"
client_name              << Client Name >>
# Sample for client_key is: "/etc/telegraf/.chef/admin.pem"
# client_key should be path of the file from step 2
client_key               << Client Key File Path>>
ssl_verify_mode          :verify_none
log_level                :info
log_location             STDOUT
  5. Test the script execution using this command: 
     sudo /opt/opscode/bin/knife exec -c /etc/telegraf/.chef/knife.rb /etc/telegraf/.chef/chef-metrics-collector

    You should get a response such as the following:

     {
   "server.nodes_count": 2,
   "server.cookbooks_count": 11,
   "server.roles_count": 1,
   "server.environments_count": 1,
   "server.rabbitmq_messages_ready": 0,
   "server.postgresql_seq_scan": 1820630,
   "server.postgresql_seq_tup_read": 213945431,
   "server.postgresql_idx_scan": 13817008,
   "server.postgresql_idx_tup_fetch": 12098595,
   "server.postgresql_n_tup_ins": 8689,
   "server.postgresql_n_tup_upd": 1365,
   "server.postgresql_n_tup_del": 4639,
   "server.postgresql_n_live_tup": 14980,
   "server.postgresql_n_dead_tup": 841,
   "server.postgresql_connection_count": 26,
   "server.status": 1,
   "server.rest_api": 1,
   "server.sql_db": 1,
   "server.index": 1,
   "server.run_success": 0,
   "server.run_failure": 0,
   "server.run_aborted": 0
 }

    If the script does not execute, adjust the file permissions and the path to the knife executable.

Step 3: Enable the Exec Input Plugin

Create a chef.conf file in /etc/telegraf/telegraf.d and add configuration settings for the Exec plugin. Use the following snippet as a guide:

# Read metrics exposed by chef
[[inputs.exec]]
  commands = ["sudo /opt/opscode/bin/knife exec -c /etc/telegraf/.chef/knife.rb /etc/telegraf/.chef/chef-metrics-collector"]
  timeout = "5s"
  name_override = "chef"
  data_format = "json"

Step 4: Enable the Nginx Input Plugin

Create a chef-nginx.conf file in /etc/telegraf/telegraf.d and add configuration settings for the nginx plugin. Use the following snippet as a guide:

[[inputs.nginx]]
  urls = ["http://localhost:9999/nginx_status"]
  name_override = "chef.nginx"

Step 5: Run Telegraf

Execute the command sudo telegraf --config /etc/telegraf/telegraf.conf --config-directory /etc/telegraf/telegraf.d to run your Telegraf agent and push metrics to Wavefront.

NOTE: Telegraf must run as a sudo user. If Telegraf runs as a service, the user under whom the service runs should have passwordless sudo capability.

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