Entityd Monitoring Agent for Cobe.io

A daemon which monitors entities on a host system and streams them to cobe.io.

Installation

It is recommended to get a binary conda-based distribution from https://cobe.io which provides the entire Python environment required. Once you have created a Topology Instance there it will offer to download an agent and provide installation instructions.

However if you prefer you can install from PyPI as well, a few more manual steps are needed. The entityd package relies on some other PyPI packages which may require install-time compilation depending on your setup. If your system has everything available then installation is as simple as:

pip install entityd

Alternatively you may prefer to install into a virtualenv created just for entityd, the pipsi project makes this very convenient:

pipsi install entityd

Configuration

To securely communicate with cobe.io you need to install encryption keys which you can download from the agent installation page on cobe.io. There are two files to download, modeld.key and entityd.key_secret, which need to be installed into an etc/entityd/keys/ directory. If you installed entityd into a virtualenv, as recommended, then this directory is relative inside the virtualenv, e.g.: /path/to/venv/etc/entityd/keys/. You may have to create the directory before moving the keys there.

Systemd

Once installed you probably want to ensure it gets started automatically. This will depend on the init system in use by your host.

If you are using systemd you can install the following unit file to /etc/systemd/system/entityd.service, being sure to provide the correct path to the installed binary and the correct destination for your Topology Instance:

[Unit]
Description=Entityd monitoring agent for cobe.io
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/entityd --dest=tcp://modeld.example.cobe.io:25010

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Once the unit file is installed you can start entityd using systemctl start entityd.service. To automatically start it on system boot you also need to execute sytemctl enable entityd.service. If you modify the unit file be sure to execute systemctl daemon-reload to re-read the configuration.