sensu-ansible/docs/example_infra.md

Example Infrastructure Layout

This document showcases an example layout for use with the Sensu role within your infrastructure. It ties in with use of inventory grouping and variables.

Inventory & Variables

Sensu/Uchiwa variables

Let's start with an example Ansible Inventory:

[rabbitmq_servers]
test.cmacr.ae

[redis_servers]
redis.cmacr.ae

[sensu_masters]
sensu.cmacr.ae

[webservers]
blog.cmacr.ae
web.cmacr.ae
sab.cmacr.ae
tater.cmacr.ae
beardy.cmacr.ae
pkgsrc.cmacr.ae

[zones]
ansible.cmacr.ae
beardy.cmacr.ae
blog.cmacr.ae
bunny.cmacr.ae
git.cmacr.ae
irc.cmacr.ae
pkgsrc.cmacr.ae
redis.cmacr.ae
sab.cmacr.ae
sensu.cmacr.ae
tater.cmacr.ae
web.cmacr.ae
test.cmacr.ae

Here we have some nodes grouped into rabbitmq_servers, redis_servers, sensu_masters, webservers, and zones.

Since we only want one Sensu "master", the default to act as a master in this role is set to false - defined by sensu_master.

There are several ways to approach setting sensu_master to true for the node you'd like to act as the Sensu "master". Personally, I do this by setting the following in group_vars/sensu_masters.yml:

sensu_master: true
sensu_include_dashboard: true

You can see I decided I want the Uchiwa dashboard to be deployed also, so I set sensu_include_dashboard to true.

The above code could also be set straight in the node's host_vars file: host_vars/sensu.cmacr.ae.yml or set straight in a playbook intended just for the sensu_masters node:

  - hosts: sensu_masters
    vars:
	  sensu_master: true
	  sensu_include_dashboard: true
    roles:
	  - sensu.sensu

RabbitMQ/redis variables

You'll probably have noticed the two groups rabbitmq_servers and redis_servers in the example inventory. Quite self explanatory what these are, but - as with the sensu_master variable in the previous section - both the rabbitmq_server & redis_server values are set to false by default (defined in defaults/main.yml).

The same approach of setting these to true is taken here again. Once more, I opt to set these in group_vars, like so:

group_vars/rabbitmq_servers.yml

rabbitmq_server: true

group_vars/redis_servers.yml

redis_server: true

The same can, again, be set directly in your RabbitMQ/redis nodes' host_vars files, or done so in the playbook as shown in the previous section for the values sensu_master & sensu_include_dashboard.