Book Image

Mastering SaltStack - Second Edition

Book Image

Mastering SaltStack - Second Edition

Overview of this book

SaltStack is a powerful configuration management and automation suite designed to manage servers and tens of thousands of nodes. This book showcases Salt as a very powerful automation framework. We will review the fundamental concepts to get you in the right frame of mind, and then explore Salt in much greater depth. You will explore Salt SSH as a powerful tool and take Salt Cloud to the next level. Next, you’ll master using Salt services with ease in your infrastructure. You will discover methods and strategies to scale your infrastructure properly. You will also learn how to use Salt as a powerful monitoring tool. By the end of this book, you will have learned troubleshooting tips and best practices to make the entire process of using Salt pain-free and easy.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Mastering SaltStack Second Edition
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Monitoring basics


There are a number of different monitoring systems available today, some of which have modules inside Salt to support them. However, different systems provide different types of monitoring.

Establishing a baseline

Take, for example, the classic sysstat monitoring package in Linux. By default, it collects data on various system vitals every 10 minutes. Over a period of time, analysis of this data will paint a picture of what the system looks like under normal load. Spikes or dips are likely to occur from time to time, which may or may not be normal.

For instance, after monitoring a web server for a few weeks, it may become evident that load average gradually increases throughout the morning and in the afternoon before spiking for a few hours in the evening and dropping off before midnight. Depending on the type of website, weekends may experience more traffic than weekdays. This will manifest itself in tools, such as sysstat. This is how the output from sysstat looks:

# sar...