User:Yuvipanda/Shinken for labs

This page is incomplete, has plans for opt-in monitoring of hosts on Wikimedia Labs, using Shinken.

Package

Shinken doesn't have ubuntu packages for 2.0 which is their reccomended version. It is a work in progress in the Shinken community, so I'll keep tabs on that. Right now, for testing purposes only, we use pip to install shinken.

Puppet

One of the problems with labs is resource collection and how that has to be handled in an insecure environment (when anyone can have root on machines). This is a problem since it could easily lead to arbitrary code execution on the monitoring host.

So current plan is to *not* use resource collection, but since the monitoring is only opt-in, each project that wants to be monitored could just have a specific class/role that sets up all the monitors, and this is manually included in the definition for the monitoring host. Note that this is the theoretical solution, with probably many flaws that will become apparent when we actually try to use them.