Managing Loggly devices and inputs via Chef

Introduction

Recently I have been experimenting with the logging-as-a-service platform at Loggly. It seems pretty promising, and there’s a free tier for those who are indexing less than 200MB per day.

Since I am using Chef to manage my systems, I decided I would take a crack at writing a LWRP that would allow me to manage devices and inputs on my Loggly account through Chef. This makes it possible for new nodes to register themselves as Loggly devices when they are provisioned, without requiring me to make a trip to the Loggly control panel. The resulting cookbook is available here: http://github.com/cwjohnston/chef-loggly

Requirements

  • Valid Loggly account username and password
  • json ruby gem

Required node attributes

  • node['loggly']['username'] - Your Loggly username.
  • node['loggly']['password'] - Your Loggly password.

In the future these attributes should be made optional so that usernames and passwords can be specified as parameters for resource attributes.

Recipes

  • default - simply installs the json gem. Chef requires this gem as well, so it should already be available.
  • rsyslog - creates a loggly input for receiving syslog messages, registers the node as a device on that input and configures rsyslog to forward syslog messages there.

Resources

loggly_input - manage a log input

Attributes

  • domain - The subdomain for your loggly account
  • description - An optional descriptor for the input
  • type - The kind of input to create. May be one of the following:
    • http
    • syslogudp
    • syslogtcp
    • syslog_tls
    • syslogtcp_strip
    • syslogudp_strip

Actions

  • create - create the named input (default)
  • delete - delete the named input

Usage

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loggly_input "production-syslog" do
    domain "examplecorp"
    type "syslogtcp"
    description "syslog messages from production nodes"
    action :create
end

loggly_device - manage a device which sends logs to an input

The name of a loggly_device resource should be the IP address for the device. Loggly doesn’t do DNS lookups, it just wants the device’s IP.

Resource Attributes

  • username - Your Loggly username. if no value is provided for this attribute, the value of node['loggly']['username'] will be used.
  • password - Your Loggly password. if no value is provided for this attribute, the value of node['loggly']['password'] will be used.
  • domain - The subdomain for your loggly account
  • input - the name of the input this device should be added to

Resource Actions

  • add - add the device to the named input (default)
  • delete - remove the device from the named input

Usage

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loggly_device node[:ipaddress] do
    domain "examplecorp"
    input "production-syslog"
    action :add
end