Migration of services to the Telegraph Agent

by Marcin Rzepa | 9 May 2023 | Knowledge, Technologies

Participating in the school event “Interesting profession of a parent”, my daughter asked me: “Dad, what do you actually do at your work?”. And something what seems is obvious to me, in the first moment. And I realised that in the first moment I could not explain just like that something what seems obvious to me. It’s not so easy to explain in an understandable way to a ten-year-old girl what architecture design, business automation process, virtualization system or the very meaning of the word “deployment” is. What’s more of that to talk about it in an interesting and understandable way in front of so-called “lodge of mockers” what her peers stand for .

After a moment of reflection and analysis of the recent issues I faced, I told her how in the 21st century, we save something that, in my opinion, is the most precious – time. How to reduce the amount of “gray hair” on her colleagues’ parents’ heads by eliminating repetitive activities from their lives 

So briefly today by using the example of the INDEVOPS team’s involvement in a relatively simple issue. Let’s take a look at the major monitoring system for infrastructure, services, applications based on the vRealize Aria Operations solution. It has been expanded over the years and now it uses more than 4,000 EP Ops agent instances. Since the 8.4 version supporting only the telelgraph agent, the long-awaited day had come when those several thousand EP Ops objects had to be “upgraded” to Telegraph objects. Unfortunately, with no upgrading access, this meant not only redefining, but also reconfiguring several thousand new objects.

If anyone of you have manually configured Telegraph objects, then you are well aware of the Sisyphean task you need to face. I’ve already seen the enthusiasm of administrators in clicking on the GUI all the objects one by one. We’ve already seen the satisfaction on the faces of executives of quickly executed reconfigurations and maintaining continuity in monitoring. If it’s only a matter of clicking a few up to several objects, once in a while, using the standard interface system can be fun.

However, in a situation when we have to recreate 4000 thousand objects in a short period of time, reconfigure more objects, introduce naming conventions, we are no longer enthusiastic to the manual execution of the constantly repeating activities. What’s worse, human mistake can always occur, which can prolong the process and make it more annoying. And with this number it means about several months of work.

Therefore, we were given a task to complete:  Please recreate in the Telegraph agent all HTTP/TCP/ICMP checks, processes and EP Ops services, maintaining the accepted naming convention and continuity of monitoring. Deadline – one month.

We got down to work, as our paramount goal is timeliness, and thus customer satisfaction.

In the first step, an analysis and inventory of all EP ops facilities was performed.

Among other things, we used vrops’ reporting module, which helped us exclude objects that no longer exist or generate errors.

Then our development team, for whom nothing is impossible, developed a configuration tool:

• HTTP/TCP/ICMP checks
• Linux process
• Windows services
• 

It should be mentioned that the solution prepared by us is able to retrieve the current object configuration from the vROPS instance and adapt it to the Telegraf agent configuration template. The administrator, before the final launch, can verify if the data is correctly entered, and if the systems on which the objects will be configured have the Telegraf agent installed.

Each run ends with a summary report listing the objects on which the configuration failed.

Using the tool, the migration process of more than 7,000 objects was completed within 5 days.

Naming standardization has been simplified. And with the simultaneous use of logical grouping rules in the system, objects are automatically assigned to the correct application, environment (production, test), custodian.

Currently, administrators in their daily work actively use the tool when adding more applications to monitoring. Including Telegraf to the monitoring of each successive application reduces the execution time by 50%.

Of course, at my daughter’s school I did not talk about the above example. My speech was a presentation on the use of technology, modern solutions that make our daily life easier and eliminate activities that simply make us people bored by repeating them all the time.

Surprisingly the “lodge of mockers” received my speech with great interest. In the same manner they had many interesting ideas and solutions for eliminating from their lives the everyday activities of going to school and learning.