Automate deployment of FSO Machine Agent

This solution shows how to get started with monitoring and observability using FSO's Machine Agent and installation of the FSO cluster-agent on Kubernetes using Terraform. How to:

• Use Terraform to deploy five virtual machines in vSphere followed by the installation of Apache and the FSO Machine Agent using Ansible.
• Once Terraform provisions the virtual machines, a provisioner within Terraform calls the Ansible playbook that installs Apache, Docker, the FSO Machine and Kubernetes cluster Agents.

The main objective is to get started with monitoring your infrastructure by showing an automated way of getting the FSO agent installed, so that you have observability baked into an environment from the onset. We first start with the use case of monitoring virtual machines with follow-on use cases showing how Kubernetes clusters, databases, and applications are brought into the fold to ultimately provide a full-stack view of your operations in real time.

Requirements

Here is a list of dependencies to make this work in your environment:

• Terraform Cloud Business (Recommended)
• vSphere 6.7 or higher
• Terraform v0.15.2 or higher
• Ansible 2.10.2
• FSO controller instance along with its credentials
• A virtual machine template with CentOS 8.2 installed as the guest OS
• Kubernetes installed - we are using Intersight IKS (Intersight Kubernetes Service) Kubernetes deployed environment
• A Kubernetes kubeconfig file, ours is named iks-cluster01-kubeconfig.yml but you can name yours with a name that makes the most sense for you but be sure to change the variable name in main.tf.
• Helm (we tested with version 3.3.4)
• Create your own secret.tfvars file with values set for variables mentioned in the lab further down in this README.md file
• Modify the variable nsToMonitor to ensure you are monitoring valid namespaces you would like to monitor with the Cluster Agent

Credentials

We purposely did not add credentials and other sensitive information to the repo by including them in the .gitignore file. As such, if you clone this repo, you must create two files.

• first file named secret.tfvars contains sensitive Terraform variables.
• second file named variables.yml is used by Ansible.
  In this scenario, we encrypted variables.yml using the command ansible-vault command and decrypt it as needed locally. You could take the same approach or leave the file unencrypted if you are confident it will not be shared or inadvertently uploaded to a repo.

Here is a list of variables you must include and define for each file.

• secret.tfvars in HCL format (file is in the same directory as the terraform.tfvars file):
  • vsphere_user
  • vsphere_password
  • vsphere_server (the IP address or FQDN)
  • vsphere_vm_firmware (default is vsphere_vm_firmware = bios)
  • ssh-pub-key (an SSH key used with a service account that allows Ansible to connect over SSH)
  • service_account_username
  • service_account_password
• variables.yml (written in YAML) file:
  • CONTROLLER_HOST (the URI of the FSO Controller)
  • CONTROLLER_PORT (typically 443)
  • ACCOUNT_NAME (FSO Account Name)
  • MACHINE_PATH (a hierarchy that is separated with a | For example: San Jose|Rack1|)
  • ACCOUNT_ACCESS_KEY (this value is available in the FSO Controller)
  • APPD_BEARER_TOKEN (is the token that is derived from the available image download via cURL)

Variables values required

Make sure the variable addressed in a terraform var files

Credential values required in secret.tfvar

Terraform keeps sensitive values in a file named secret.tfvarand, because the values contain sensitive information such as account credentials, it's not posted here so you'll need to make one using your credentials.

Be sure to add secret.tfvar to your *.gitignore file to be sure you don't accidentally expose your credentials if you push your changes back to GitHub or other Git repository.

Be sure to add secret.tfvar to your *.gitignore file to ensure you don't accidentally expose your credentials if you push your changes back to GitHub or other Git repository.

Example secret.tfvar file

# FSO controller credentials
controller_url       = "https://bit.saas.FSO.com:443"
controller_account   = "saas01"
controller_username  = "majid"
controller_password  = "mypassword"
controller_accessKey = "v11234567"

What Terraform Provisions

In this example, Terraform uses the vsphere provider and a vsphere_virtual_machine resource to:

• Create five virtual machines from virtual machine template.
• Add the SSH key of a service account to each host.
• Run an Ansible playbook that performs the steps in the next section.

What Ansible Installs and Configures

After Terraform creates five virtual machines, the Ansible playbook installs and configures:

• Apache Web Server
• Firewall with port 80 opened
• Docker
• DNS (resolv.conf is configured)
• FSO Machine Agent

Each Apache Web Server is configured with a custom (using a Jinja template) index.html page that displays the hostname.

The same approach is taken with the FSO Machine Agent. In other words, a Jinja template creates a custom file for each containing the hostname.

Creating and Applying the Terraform Plan

we used terraform Cloud business for the purpose of this practice. Create a new workspace and connect to github to add the Cisco-FSO-install-agent from github. Next step, all variable needs to be addressed if they are not addressed in variable files or variables set.

Results

Virtual Machines

You see five virtual machines that are created with static IP addresses in vSphere.

Apache Web Servers

Each Apache server has a custom index.html file that includes the hostname of the machine.

FSO Controller

The five virtual machines appear in the FSO controller, each running an Apache Web Server, and all five appearing in the FSO controller.

Also, you will see information about your Kubernetes clusters reported to the FSO Controller by the Kubernetes Agent. To see the information, log into your FSO Controller and navigate to the Servers Tab and clicking Clusters on the left-most navigation panel.

Click any of the check box available just before the OS column; then click View Details to see that the data reported by the Machine Agent to the FSO Controller.

You can see the data that is reported by the Machine Agent on apache-webserver-1.

10. To see details about the service, click the service and click Details.

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