salmon 0.1.5

A monitoring system built on top of Salt.

A multi-server monitoring system built on top of Salt using Django.

The project currently isn’t much more than proof-of-concept. I’m interested in exploring its usefulness as both an alerting system like monit and a monitoring system like munin (perhaps using Graphite’s whisper database).

Installation

It’s expected that you’ll run this on the same server as the Salt master.

To bootstrap the project:

virtualenv salmon
source salmon/bin/activate
pip install salmon
salmon init
salmon upgrade

Fire up the web server with:

salmon start

Now create a config file for your checks. There is a commented example in the repo. Store this in the same directory as your conf.py file (default: ~/.salmon/checks.yaml).

Once you have your checks defined, you can run manage.py run_checks periodically with cron and view the status at http://localhost:9000.

Configuring Salt

For security reasons, you shouldn’t run this as root on your server. Instead, use (or create) a less privileged user and modify your Salt master config to only provide access to the specific functions it needs to check. For example, you could create /etc/salt/master.d/monitor_acl.conf with the following contents:

client_acl:
  youruser:
    - '.*':
      - test.ping
      - service.status
      - disk.usage
      - 'ps.*'
      - file.check_hash

Be sure to restart the salt-master for configuration changes to take effect. For more details, read the docs on Salt’s client_acl.