newrelic-ansible-tutorial

I am doing this in a MacOS terminal.

let's confirm we have ansible installed on our laptop

ansible-playbook --version

let's create new folder to hold the code we need to deploy newrelic with ansible.

mkdir newlic_ansible

let's move into that folder

cd newlic_ansible

let's create a folder to store our ansible roles, in our case just the newrelic role.

mkdir roles
ansible-galaxy install newrelic.newrelic-infra -p roles

The last command downloaded the role from the ansible galaxy repository and placed it in the "roles" folder.

let's make the folder to hold our configuration files. This file hold your ssh credentials. Adjust ssh user and password as needed. Keep in mind that the accoutn you will use needs passwordless sudo access.

mkdir group_vars
cat <<EOF >> group_vars/all
---
# file: group_vars/all
ansible_connection: ssh
ansible_ssh_user: vagrant
ansible_ssh_pass: vagrant
EOF

confirm the content of the file

cat group_vars/all

let's set some sane default ssh configuration for ansible

cat <<EOF >> ansible.cfg
[defaults]
host_key_checking = False
ssh_args = -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no
EOF

confirm the content of the file

cat ansible.cfg

Now we need to create a playbook file to deploy newrelic to our hosts. You may create a file with the Following content. Adjust as necessary see the roles/newrelic.newrelic-infra/meta/main.yml file for supported Operating Systems. I am calling my host groups "frontends" in the example below. '*' for agent version means latest. You may insert a specific version number if needed x.y.z new relic will log to the /var/log/nr-infra.log. Note that if you change this the folder should exist

cat <<EOF >> setup.yml
- name: NewRelic
  hosts: frontends
  become: true
  roles:
    - name: newrelic.newrelic-infra
      vars:
        nrinfragent_os_name: Debian 
        nrinfragent_os_version: trusty
        nrinfragent_version: '*'
        nrinfragent_config:
          license_key: INSERT_YOUR_LICENCE_KEY_HERE
          log_file: /var/log/nr-infra.log
          log_to_stdout: false
EOF

let's confirm the content of the file

cat setup.yml

Now we can finally create the file describing the list of the hosts we want to deploy to.

cat <<EOF >> hosts
[frontends]
192.168.0.83
192.168.0.84
EOF

let's confirm the content of the file

cat hosts

This file will let me deploy newrelic to two hosts of ip 192.168.0.83 and 192.168.0.84. The name of our hostgroup is "frontends" (consistent with what is used in setup.yml file).

we can now run ansible with the following command:

ansible-playbook --check -i hosts setup.yml

the --check wil run ansible in dry-run mode. examine the output and confirm the behaviours.

Now you can run ansible to deploy

ansible-playbook -i hosts setup.yml

within five minutes the hosts should show up in the dashboard.

lesaux/newrelic-ansible-tutorial

newrelic-ansible-tutorial