machine_stats 0.0.4

A simple and effective way to gather machine statistics (RAM, Storage, CPU, etc.) from server environment

Machine Stats for Unix-like systems

Machine Stats for Linux/Unix leverages Ansible to gather facts in a cross-platform way.

Data captured

For *nix based systems, by default, the following metrics are captured from the resources and sent and stored in Tidal Migrations:

Host Name
FQDN
IP Addresses
RAM Allocated (GB)
RAM Used (GB)
Storage Allocated (GB)
Storage Used (GB)
CPU Count
Operating System
Operating System Version
CPU name

Requirements

1. Git

   # Debian/Ubuntu
   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get install git
   
   # Fedora
   sudo dnf -y update
   sudo dnf -y install git
   
   # RHEL/CentOS
   sudo yum update
   sudo yum install git
   
   # macOS (Xcode)
   xcode-select --install
   
   # macOS (brew)
   brew install git
   

   Or follow the installation instructions on Git's web site

2. pipenv

   # Debian 10+/Ubuntu 20.04+
   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get install pipenv
   
   # Fedora 32+
   sudo dnf -y update
   sudo dnf -y install pipenv
   
   # RHEL 7
   sudo yum install rh-python38
   scl enable rh-python38 bash
   python3.8 -m pip install --user pipenv
   
   # RHEL 8
   sudo yum install python3
   python3 -m pip install --user pipenv
   

   Or follow the installation instructions on pipenv web site

Installation

We are going to install Machine Stats for Unix-like systems in user's $HOME directory instead of system-wide, so the installation won't affect system libraries and packages.

First of all, let's obtain the sources of Machine Stats.

Open your terminal emulator and change the current working directory to your $HOME directory by running this simple command:

cd 

Let's fetch the sources from our Git repository:

git clone https://github.com/tidalmigrations/machine_stats.git

All of the code should be downloaded into a machine_stats directory, let's change into that directory:

cd machine_stats

This directory contains scripts for both Window version and the version for Unix-like systems. We need the latter, so let's switch to the appropriate directory:

cd unix

Let's install packages which are needed for Machine Stats to run properly by executing the following command:

pipenv install

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Machine Stats for Unix-like systems! Let's start actually using it!

Usage

1. Create a hosts file in the current directory.
2. Add connection strings in the form of ssh-user@ip-address or ssh-user@domain to the hosts file one per line If the ssh-user@ part is omitted, then the current user name is used.
3. If you need to use a custom SSH identity file for some particular host, provide it as the following:

[e-mail] ansible_ssh_private_key_file=path/to/key-file.pem

4. Make sure that Python 2.6+ is installed on the machines from hosts file.
5. If python executable was installed into non-default location (not in /usr/bin/python), add the ansible_python_interpreter parameter to the hosts file after the host IP/domain, for example:

freebsd.example.com ansible_python_interpreter=/usr/local/bin/python

6. Execute pipenv run stats and pipe its output to Tidal Tools:

$ pipenv run stats | tidal sync servers

Getting information about RHEL 5 hosts

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is shipped with Python 2.4 but machine_stats requires at least Python 2.6. To install Python 2.6 on your RHEL 5 machine follow these steps. NOTE: this doesn't update the existing Python packages, but installs Python 2.6 alongside with system Python packages.

1. Download Python 2.6 package and its dependencies from EPEL repository:

$ sudo curl -L -OOO -k \
    http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/epel/5/x86_64/{python26-libs-2.6.8-2.el5.x86_64.rpm,libffi-3.0.5-1.el5.x86_64.rpm,python26-2.6.8-2.el5.x86_64.rpm}

2. Install the packages:

$ sudo rpm -ivh python26*.rpm libffi*.rpm

3. Use non-standard Python location in your hosts file:

[e-mail] ansible_python_interpreter=/usr/bin/python2.6

Generating a hosts file from Tidal Migrations

Pro-Tip: If you already use Tidal Migrations Ansible Tower integration script you can use its output to generate the hosts file for machine_stats.

Requirements

• jq

Usage

cd ansible-tower-integration
./tidal_inventory.py | jq -r '.servers.hosts[]' > path/to/hosts

Troubleshooting

How to permanently enable the Python 3.8 software collection on RHEL 7

You should always enable the Python software collection before using pipenv with the following command:

scl enable rh-python38 bash

To permanently add Python 3 to your $PATH, you can add an scl_source command to the “dot files” for your specific user. The benefit of this approach is that the collection is already enabled at every login.

Using your preferred text editor, add the following line to your ~/.bashrc:

# Add RHSCL Python 3 to my login environment
source scl_source enable rh-python38