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Install the agent

This page document a quick way of installing the agent. For production system, you may want to use trusted certificate and other enhancement.

Prerequisites

In order to run temBoard agent, you need:

  • Linux as underlying OS.
  • PostgreSQL 9.6+, listening on UNIX socket. Check with sudo -u postgres psql.
  • openssl.
  • Python 3.6+. Check with python --version.
  • bash, curl and sudo for setup script.
  • A running temBoard UI.

Note

The temBoard agent must run on the same host as the PostgreSQL instance. Running an agent on a remote host is not yet supported.

Installation

temBoard RPM are published on Dalibo Labs YUM repository. temBoard agent supports RHEL/CentOS 7 and 8. Start by enabling Dalibo Labs YUM repository.

$ sudo yum install -y epel-release
$ sudo yum install -y https://yum.dalibo.org/labs/dalibo-labs-4-1.noarch.rpm

Warning

Do NOT use temBoard agent rpm from PGDG. They are known to be broken.

With the YUM repository configured, you can install temBoard agent with:

$ sudo yum install temboard-agent
$ temboard-agent --version

Offline install

Some production infrastructure are offline for security reasons. In this situation, the temboard-agent package and its dependencies can be dowloaded with the following commands :

$ sudo yum install yum-utils
$ yumdownloader --resolve --destdir /tmp/temboard-packages temboard-agent

Then the downloaded packages can be transfered to the production server and installed with

$ yum --disablerepo=* localinstall *.rpm

temBoard debs are published on Dalibo Labs APT repository. temBoard agent supports Debian buster and newer. Start by enabling Dalibo Labs APT repository.

# echo deb http://apt.dalibo.org/labs $(lsb_release -cs)-dalibo main > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/dalibo-labs.list
# curl -fsSL -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/dalibo-labs.gpg https://apt.dalibo.org/labs/debian-dalibo.gpg
# apt update  # You may use apt-get here.

You can install now temBoard agent with:

# apt install temboard-agent
# temboard-agent --version

temBoard agent wheel and source tarball are published on PyPI.

Installing from PyPI requires Python3.6+, pip and wheel. It's better to have a recent version of pip.

$ sudo pip install temboard-agent
$ temboard-agent --version

Note where is installed temBoard agent and determine the prefix. You must find a share/temboard-agent folder in e.g /usr or /usr/local. If temBoard agent is installed in /usr/local, please adapt the documentation to match this system prefix.

Setup one instance

To finish the installation, you will need to follow the next steps for each Postgres instance on the host:

  • configure the agent;
  • start the agent;
  • finally register it in the UI.

The quickest way to setup temBoard agent is to use the auto_configure.sh script, installed in /usr/share/temboard-agent.

You must run this script as root, with PG* env vars set to connect to the Postgres cluster you want to manage. By default, the script uses postgres UNIX user to connect to Postgres cluster.

Note

Each instance is identified by the fully qualified hostname. If hostname --fqdn can't resolve the FQDN of your HOST, simply overwrite it using TEMBOARD_HOSTNAME envvar. Remember that localhost or even a short hostname is not enough. auto_configure.sh enforces this.

# /usr/share/temboard-agent/auto_configure.sh https://temboard.acme.tld:8888

The script shows you some important information for the next steps:

  • agent TCP port (usually 2345 if this is your first agent on this host).
  • the path to the main agent configuration file like /etc/temboard-agent/14/main/temboard-agent.conf

Note

Some parts of the configuration are in /etc/temboard-agent/14/main/temboard-agent.conf.d/auto.conf too and override the main configuration file.

Next you need to fetch the signing public key of temBoard UI. An agent accepts requests from a single temBoard UI. temBoard UI signs each requests using an asymetric key. Use temboard-agent fetch-key to download the signing key from the configured UI. Or push the signing using a configuration management service.

# temboard-agent --config /etc/temboard-agent/14/main/temboard-agent.conf fetch-key

Now start the agent using the command suggested by auto_configure.sh. On most systems now, it's a systemd service:

# systemctl enable --now temboard-agent@14-main

Check that it has started successfully:

# systemctl status temboard-agent@14-main

Now you can register the agent in the UI using temboard-agent register. It needs the configuration file path, the agent host and port and the path to the temBoard UI.:

# sudo -u postgres temboard-agent -c /etc/temboard-agent/14/main/temboard-agent.conf register --groups default

temboard-agent register will ask you credentials to the temBoard UI with admin privileges.

Note

temBoard agent OOM score is configured to 15, so that OOM killer will likely kill temBoard agent before Postgres. A good practice is to disable memory overcommit on PostgreSQL host by setting sysctl vm.overcommit_memory = 2.

It’s up!

Congratulation! You can continue on the UI and see the agent appeared, and monitoring data being graphed.

You can repeat the above setup for each instance on the same host.

Cleaning agent installation

If you need to clean a single agent installation either to uninstall it or to run auto_configure.sh again, use purge.sh with cluster name.

# /usr/share/temboard-agent/share/purge.sh 12/main
Stopping and disabling systemd service.
Removed /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/temboard-agent@12-main.service.
Cleaning files and directories...
removed '/etc/temboard-agent/12/main/temboard-agent.conf'
removed '/etc/temboard-agent/12/main/temboard-agent.conf.d/auto.conf'
removed directory '/etc/temboard-agent/12/main/temboard-agent.conf.d'
removed '/etc/temboard-agent/12/main/users'
removed directory '/etc/temboard-agent/12/main/'
removed directory '/var/lib/temboard-agent/12/main/'
temBoard agent 12-main stopped and cleaned.
#

Last update: 2024-02-16