Remote Hosts
Contrail Insights can monitor hosts remotely without installing Contrail Insights Agent on the host. Such hosts can be configured using Ansible playbooks. Metric collection is supported using SNMP (version 2c or 3) and Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI).
Configure a Remote Host in Contrail Insights for Monitoring
Set the variable appformix_plugins with an enabled plug-in for remote host monitoring. Some certified_plug-ins
already ship out of box and are defined in the certified_plugins directory. This variable must be run at the time of Contrail Insights
Platform installation. For example:
appformix_plugins:
- { plugin_info: 'certified_plugins/snmp_host_usage.json' }
- { plugin_info: 'certified_plugins/ipmi_host_usage.json' }
During installation a remote_host tag needs to be defined in the inventory. For
each host in this group, configuration variables need to be specified in the
inventory/hosts. Refer to the Create Ansible Inventory topic
for instructions on which step of the installation these variables need to be set.
See Contrail Insights Installation and Configuration for OpenStack.
The following configurations can be enabled for remote host monitoring.
Host with only SNMP version 2c.
Host with only SNMP version 3 and its required parameters.
Host with only IPMI metrics.
Host with IPMI metrics and SNMP version 2c metrics.
Host with IPMI metrics and SNMP version 3 metrics.
The following sample inventory illustrates how to configure the above cases.
[remote_host]
host1 snmp_ip='host1_snmp_ip' snmp_version='2c' snmp_community='public'
host2 snmp_ip='host2_snmp_ip' snmp_version='3' snmp_level='authnoPriv' snmp_user='user1' snmp_protocol='MD5' snmp_pwd='pass1'
host3 ipmi_ip='host3_ipmi_ip' ipmi_user='user1' ipmi_pwd='pass1'
host4 ipmi_ip='host4_ipmi_ip' ipmi_user='user1' ipmi_pwd='pass1' snmp_ip='host4_snmp_ip' snmp_version='2c' snmp_community='public'
host5 ipmi_ip='host5_ipmi_ip' ipmi_user='user1' ipmi_pwd='pass1' snmp_ip='host5_snmp_ip' snmp_version='3' snmp_level='authnoPriv' snmp_user='user1' snmp_protocol='MD5' snmp_pwd='pass1'
The following sample inventory illustrates how to configure the devices with variables that share common values for all hosts. Refer to Ansible inventory documentation for further details.
[remote_host]
host1 snmp_ip='host1_snmp_ip'
host2 snmp_ip='host2_snmp_ip'
[remote_host:vars]
snmp_version='2c'
snmp_community='public'
Packages Needed for Remote Host Monitoring
The SNMP and IPMI plug-ins are executed by Contrail Insights
Agent running on a host in the appformix_platform aggregate. Some packages must be present on such hosts to ensure
the plug-in execution succeeds. The Contrail Insights playbooks will
handle the installation of the packages if the following flag is set
in the group_vars/all at the time the Contrail
Insights Platform is installed.
appformix_remote_host_monitoring_enabled: true
The following are the packages that are required by the SNMP
and IPMI plug-ins running on the appformix_platform hosts.
For Ubuntu:
snmp
snmp-mibs-downloader
ipmitool
For CentOS or Red Hat Enterprise Linux:
net-snmp
net-snmp-utils
ipmitool