I want to use Zabbix to monitor my server (just one so far). In order to keep things neat, I've decided to run it in Docker containers. I just have doubts about the usage of the agent in a container. As far as I understand it should be able to monitor the host itself. But containers are usually isolated. So what's the point to run the agent in the container?
And if there is a reason to do so, should the network mode for agent's container be "host"?
Intro:
I've just done a fully Dockerized Zabbix 6.2 installation using Zabbix's GitHub Docker-Compose repo. My experience was that the Docker install was the better path, but other's might of course have different views.
Although it looks really daunting- there's a lot of components in it- Zabbix's Docker-Compose repo is the quickest and least painful way to fire-up a Zabbix installation; much easier to setup than a manual config.
I used their repo to configure an all-singing-all-dancing Zabbix infrastructure on a Raspberry Pi4 with 8GB RAM using a 64bit ARM version of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. It would have taken ages to get the same results with a manual config.
There was one issue regarding connectivity problems I note at the end however. But once you get past that it's plug-n-chug.
Configuration:
Below is a very general outline of the process of configuring Zabbix using their Docker-Compose repo.
Server Infrastructure
The basic form of raising the components is:
docker-compose -f docker-compose_v3_ubuntu_pgsql_latest.yaml --profile all up -d
NOTE: 172.16.238.3 is the default IP of the Zabbix Server in my testing- it should be yours as well- but validate the IP.
Agents:
Starting an Agent is as simple as:
docker run --add-host=zabbix-server:172.16.238.3 -p 10050:10050 -d --privileged --name myHost-zabbix-agent -e ZBX_SERVER_HOST="zabbix-server" -e ZBX_PASSIVE_ALLOW="true" zabbix/zabbix-agent:ubuntu-6.0-latest
Just change "myHost-zabbix-agent" and add the new Zabbix Agent in the Web interface.
To get the IP of a new Zabbix agent raised with the above command:
docker ps
Then get the random id for it and:
docker exec -u root -it (random ID for agent from docker ps) bash
Once inside the container, reveal it's IP with:
hostname -I
Use this IP for the Agent's interface in the Zabbix server's web interface. As you've rightly remarked, since the agent runs in a container, it's isolated and the default IP pf 127.0.0.1 won't work: you need a routable IP for the Zabbix Server to reach the Agent on.
Then move on to the next host, changing the hostname in the docker run command above, get the Ip and add it in the Zabbix Server's web interface.
Conclusion:
Nothing stopping you from tailoring the configuration- Zabbix has made it very tweakable- but using Zabbix's Docker-Compose GitHub repo enables you to get some decent monitoring in place quickly with little effort and reduces the grunt work to the bare minimum; important if you have a lot of hosts.
There was one issue with configuring Agents' connectivity- Docker inserted an iptables rule which broke connectivity by NAT'ing the traffic, but I documented how to get around the problem here:
Dockerized Zabbix: Server Can't Connect to the Agents by IP
Hope this saves you some cycles-
Related
I have a server application (that I cannot change) that, when you connect as a client, will give you other URLs to interact with. Those URLs are also part of the same server so the URL advertised uses the hostname of a docker container.
We are running in a mixed economy (some docker containers, some regular applications). We actually need to set up where we have the server running as a docker application on a single VM, and that server will be accessed by non-docker clients (as well as docker clients not running on the same docker network).
So you have a server hostname (the docker container) and a docker hostname (the hostname of the VM running docker).
The client's initial connection is to: dockerhostname:1234 but when the server sends URLs to the client, it sends: serverhostname:5678 ... which is not resolvable by the client. So far, we've addressed this by adding "server hostname " to the client's /etc/hosts file but this is a pain to maintain.
I have also set the --hostname of the server docker container to the same name as the docker host and it has mostly worked but I've seen where a docker container running on the same docker network as the server had issues connecting to the server.
I realize this is not an ideal docker setup. We're migrating from a history of delivering as rpm's to delivering containers .. but it's a slow process. Our company has lots of applications.
I'm really curious if anyone has advice/lessons learned with this situation. What is the best solution to my URL problem? (I'm guessing it is the /etc/hosts we're already doing)
You can do port-mapping -p 8080:80
How you build and run your container?
With a shell command, dockerfile or yml file?
Check this:
docker port
Call this and it will work:
[SERVERIP][PORT FROM DOCKERHOST]
To work with hostnames you need DNS or use hosts file.
The hosts file solution is not a good idea, it's how the internet starts in the past ^^
If something change you have to change all hosts files on every client!
Or use a static ip for your container:
docker network ls
docker network create my-network
docker network create --subnet=172.18.0.0/16 mynet123
docker run --net mynet123 --ip 172.18.0.22 -it ubuntu bash
Assign static IP to Docker container
You're describing a situation that requires a ton of work. The shortest path to success is your "adding things to /etc/hosts file" process. You can use configuration management, like ansible/chef/puppet to only have to update one location and distribute it out.
But at that point, you should look into something called "service discovery." There are a ton of ways to skin this cat, but the short of it is this. You need some place (lazy mode is DNS) that stores a database of your different machines/services. When a machine needs to connect to another machine for a service, it asks that database. Hence the "service discovery" part.
Now implementing the database is the hardest part of this, there are a bunch of different ways, and you'll need to spend some time with your team to figure out what is the best way.
Normally running an internal DNS server like dnsmasq or bind should get you most of the way, but if you need something like consul that's a whole other conversation. There are a lot of options, and the best thing to do is research, and audit what you actually need for your situation.
I am quite new to the docker topics and I have a question of connecting container services with traditional ones.
Currently I am thinking of replacing an traditional grafana installation (directly on a linux server) with a grafana docker container.
In grafana I have to connect to different data sources like a mysql instance, a Winsows SQL Database and so on. So grafana is doing a pull of data. All these data sources reside (and will still reside) on other hosts and they are not containers.
So how can I implement that my container is able to communicate with this data sources? Is it possible by default or do I have to implement a special kind of network? I saw that there is an option called macvlan...is that the correct way?
BR
Jan
This should work out of the box, as far as I understand. At least, I'm using Grafana inside a docker container and it works perfectly.
You can test a connectivity from inside your docker container to some external resource by opening a container shell like this:
docker exec -it <container ID> /bin/bash
And then
root#a9cbebfc4564:/# curl google.com
Or
root#a9cbebfc4564:/# ping <bla-bla>
Commands above depend on a docker image environment (like OS or installed software), but this can be solved in a same was as you can do on a regular Unix env
P.S. I encountered a docker2host connection issue once, but it was due to incorrect firewall configuration on a host side.
Since you are replacing a traditional installation, you can start with host networking. This mode give you same connectivity experience as installing on the host. A quick start is as simple as:
docker run --network host grafana/grafana
Notice there's no need to --publish or --publish-all ports as the Grafana container now share the host network.
I'm using Jenkins on Docker on my local Mac Machine.
And I'm running another Docker on ubuntu VirtualBox. So now, there are 2 docker machines. one is on my mac machine and one is on my Ubuntu VirtualBox machine. I'm running Jenkins on Mac Docker. Now in the Jenkins pipeline, I want to build an image on my ubuntu machine.
I've configured Jenkins docker cloud and in the docker host URL, it is connected to the ubuntu docker-machine.
But while building a new image, I'm getting the error. Cannot connect to the Docker daemon at unix:///var/run/docker.sock. Is the docker daemon running?
I've tried even adding ExecStart=/usr/bin/dockerd -H tcp://0.0.0.0:4243 -H unix:///var/run/docker.sock
at /lib/systemd/system/docker.service
WHen i check ps -aux,
Can someone please help me out?
help is appreciated.
First personally if I had a setup like that I would not bother connecting to the remote docker and would just install a Jenkins agent on the ubuntu machine and make it talk to the Jenkins master.
But if you want to do it they way you have it set up right now we a Jenkins talking from inside out one docker host into another docker host I suggest looking into the following:
Your Jenkins master and the ubuntu machine a very isolated they might as well just be on different machines not even in the same room. Unix domain sockets, the ones that are identified by unix://* are made for communicating within a single local OS kernel, trying to bridge them into remote machine will lead to disaster.
So the only way Jenkins could communicate to the remote host is via a remote protocol like TCP. Most of the time when you install docker with the default settings it doesn't even listen to TCP at all, mostly for security reasons.
First thing you should do is to configure a docker inside of the ubuntu machine to listen on TCP port and accept connections from remote hosts. You can use netstat -nat to see if anything is listening on TCP 4243. When things are configured correctly you see the line that stats with 0.0.0.0:4243 or something like that in the output of the nestat
Second you need to make sure your the firewalls/iptables/netfilter configuration on the Ubuntu host lets in connections from outside. A good test to try is to telnet <ubuntu-ip> 4243 from a terminal session on your Mac.
Then you need to make sure you that docker networking is configured correctly so that connections from the inside of the container that is running Jenkins end up on your ubuntu box. To test you need to exec -it into your jenkins container and repeat the telnet test. On modern linuxes telnet is usually not installed, so you can use curl -vvv which will always end up with an error, so just look at the verbose output to see if the error because things cannot communicate (timeout, connection reset etc) or the error occurs because your curl tried to talk HTTP to docker and got gibberish response. In the later case you can consider things to be set up correctly.
Finally you need to tell Jenkins Docker to communicate to the remote docker via TCP. Usually that is given on the command line to your docker run, docker ps, docker exec
I've configured it by defining the slave label in my Jenkins Pipeline.
Jenkins agents run on a variety of different environments such as physical machines, virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, and Docker images.
In your Jenkins Pipeline or In your JenkinsFile, you've to set the agent accordingly to what you're using either using Docker image or any virtual machine.
Also Thank you so much #Vlad, all the things you told me, were really helpful.
I am setting up a series of Linux command line challenges (for internal use/training), similar to those at OverTheWire.org's Bandit. From some reading I have done of their infrastructure, they setup things as such:
All ssh-based games on OverTheWire run in Docker containers. When you
login with SSH to one of the games, a fresh Docker container is
created just for you. Noone else is logged in into your container, nor
are there any files from other players lying around. We opted for this
setup to provide each player with a clean environment to experiment
and learn in, which is automatically cleaned up when you log out.
This seems like an ideal solution, since everyone who logs in gets a completely clean environment (destroyed on logout) so that simultaneous players do not interfere with each other.
I am very new to Docker and understand it in principle, but am unsure about how to setup a similar system - particularly spawn new Docker instances on SSH login to a server and then destroy the instance on logout/disconnection.
I'd appreciate any advice on how to design/implement this kind of setup.
It seems to me there are two main goals here. First undestand what docker really makes and how it works. Second the sistem that orquestates the whole sistem.
Let me make some brief and short introduction. I won't go into details but mainly docker is a plaform that works like a system virtualization that lets you isolate a process, operating system or a whole aplication without any kind of hypervisor. The container shares the kernel of the host system and all that it cointains is islated from the host and the rest of the containers.
So the basic principle you are looking for is a system that orchestrates containers that has an ssh server with the port 22 open. Although there are many ways of how you could reach this goal, one way it can be with this docker sshd server image.
docker run -itd --rm rastasheep/ubuntu-sshd bash
Docker needs a process to keep alive. By using -it you are creating an interactive session with the "bash" interpreter. This will keep alive the container plus lets you start a bash terminal inside an isolated virtual ubuntu server.
--rm: will remove the container once you exists from the container.
rastasheep/ubuntu-sshd: it is the docker image id.
As you can see, there is a lack of a system that connects between your aplication and this docker platform. One approach would it be with a library that python has that uses the docker client programaticaly. As an advice I would recomend you to install docker in your computer and to try to create a couple of ubuntu servers with ssh server and to connect into it from your host. It will help you to see if it's really necesary to have sshd server, the network requisites you will need if so, to traffic all the clients into the containers. Read the oficial docker network documentation.
With the example I had described a new fresh terminal is started and there is no need to connect to the docker via ssh. By using this way you won't need to route the traffic, indentify the host free ports to connect your host to the containers or to check and shutdown the container once the connection has finished. Otherwhise the container will keep alive.
There are many ways where your system can be made and I would strongly recomend to you to start by creating some containers with the docker tool and start to understand how it works.
Docker allows servers from multiple containers to connect to each other via links and service discovery. However, from what I can see this service discovery is host-local. I would like to implement a service that uses other services hosted on a different machine.
There have been several approaches to solving this problem in Docker, such as CoreOS's jumpers, host-local services that essentially proxy to the other machine, and a whole bunch of github projects for managing Docker deployments that appear to have attempted to support this use-case.
Given the pace of development it is hard to follow what current best practices are. Therefore my question is essentially:
What (if any) is the current predominant method for linking across hosts in Docker, and
Are there any plans for supporting this functionality directly in the Docker system?
Update
Docker has recently announced a new tool called Swarm for Docker orchestration.
Swarm allows you do "join" multiple docker daemons: You first create a swarm, start a swarm manager on one machine, and have docker daemons "join" the swarm manager using the swarm's identifier. The docker client connects to the swarm manager as if it were a regular docker server.
When a container started with Swarm, it is automatically assigned to a free node that meets any constraints that have been defined. The following example is taken from the blog post:
$ docker run -d -P -e constraint:storage=ssd mysql
One of the supported constraints is "node" that allows you pin a container to a specific hostname. The swarm also resolves links across nodes.
In my testing I got the impression that Swarm doesn't yet work with volumes at a fixed location very well (or at least the process of linking them is not very intuitive), so this is something to keep in mind.
Swarm is now in beta phase.
Until recently, the Ambassador Pattern was the only Docker-native approach to remote-host service discovery. This pattern can still be used and doesn't require any magic beyond plain Docker in that the pattern consists of one or more additional containers that act as proxies.
Additionally, there are several third-party extensions to make Docker cluster-capable. Third-party solutions include:
Connecting the Docker network bridges on two hosts, lightweight and various solutions exist, but generally with some caveats
DNS-based discovery e.g. with skydock and SkyDNS
Docker management tools such as Shipyard, and Docker orchestration tools. See this question for an extensive list: How to scale Docker containers in production
UPDATE 3
Libswarm has been renamed as swarm and is now a separate application.
Here is the github page demo to use as a starting point:
# create a cluster
$ swarm create
6856663cdefdec325839a4b7e1de38e8
# on each of your nodes, start the swarm agent
# <node_ip> doesn't have to be public (eg. 192.168.0.X),
# as long as the other nodes can reach it, it is fine.
$ swarm join --token=6856663cdefdec325839a4b7e1de38e8 --addr=<node_ip:2375>
# start the manager on any machine or your laptop
$ swarm manage --token=6856663cdefdec325839a4b7e1de38e8 --addr=<swarm_ip:swarm_port>
# use the regular docker cli
$ docker -H <swarm_ip:swarm_port> info
$ docker -H <swarm_ip:swarm_port> run ...
$ docker -H <swarm_ip:swarm_port> ps
$ docker -H <swarm_ip:swarm_port> logs ...
...
# list nodes in your cluster
$ swarm list --token=6856663cdefdec325839a4b7e1de38e8
http://<node_ip:2375>
UPDATE 2
The official approach is now to use libswarm see a demo here
UPDATE
There is a nice gist for openvswitch hosts communication in docker using the same approach.
To allow service discovery there is an interesting approach based on DNS called skydock.
There is also a screencast.
This is also a nice article using the same pieces of the puzzle but adding also vlans on top:
http://fbevmware.blogspot.it/2013/12/coupling-docker-and-open-vswitch.html
The patching has nothing to do with the robustness of the solution. Docker is actually only a sort of DSL upon Linux Containers and both solutions in these articles simply bypass some Docker automatic settings and fall back directly to Linux Containers.
So you can use the solutions safely and wait to be able to do it in a simpler way once Docker will implement it.
Weave is a new Docker virtual network technology that acts as a virtual ethernet switch over TCP/UDP - all you need is a Docker container running Weave on your host.
What's interesting here is
Instead of links, use static IPs/hostnames in your virtual network
Hosts don't need full connectivity, a mesh is formed based on what peers are available, and packets will be routed multi-hop to where they need to go
This leads to interesting scenarios like
Create a virtual network across the WAN, none of the Docker containers will know or care what actual network they sit in
Move your containers to different physical docker hosts, Weave will detect the peer accordingly
For example, there's an example guide on how to create a multi-node Cassandra cluster across your laptop and a few cloud (EC2) hosts with two commands per host. I launched a CoreOS cluster with AWS CloudFormation, installed weave on each in /home/core, plus my laptop vagrant docker VM, and got a cluster up in under an hour. My laptop is firewalled but Weave seemed to be okay with that, it just connects out to its EC2 peers.
Update
Docker 1.12 contains the so called swarm mode and also adds a service abstraction. They probably aren't mature enough for every use case, but I suggest you to keep them under observation. The swarm mode at least helps in a multi-host setup, which doesn't necessarily make linking easier. The Docker-internal DNS server (since 1.11) should help you to access container names, if they are well-known - meaning that the generated names in a Swarm context won't be so easy to address.
With the Docker 1.9 release you'll get built in multi host networking. They also provide an example script to easily provision a working cluster.
You'll need a K/V store (e.g. Consul) which allows to share state across the different Docker engines on every host. Every Docker engine need to be configured with that K/V store and you can then use Swarm to connect your hosts.
Then you create a new overlay network like this:
$ docker network create --driver overlay my-network
Containers can now be run with the network name as run parameter:
$ docker run -itd --net=my-network busybox
They can also be connected to a network when already running:
$ docker network connect my-network my-container
More details are available in the documentation.
The following article describes nicely how to connect docker containers on multiple hosts: http://goldmann.pl/blog/2014/01/21/connecting-docker-containers-on-multiple-hosts/
It is possible to bridge several Docker subnets together using Open vSwitch or Tinc. I have prepared Gists to show how to do it:
Open vSwitch: https://gist.github.com/noteed/8656989
Tinc: https://gist.github.com/noteed/11031504
The advantage I see using this solution instead of the --link option and the ambassador pattern is that I find it more transparent: there is no need to have additional containers and more importantly, no need to expose ports on the host. Actually I think of the --link option to be a temporary hack before Docker get a nicer story about multi-host (or multi-daemon) setups.
Note: I know there is another answer pointing to my first Gist but I don't have enough karma to edit or comment on that answer.
As mentioned above, Weave is definitely a viable solution to link Docker containers across the hosts. Based on my own experience with it, it is fairly straightfoward to set it up. It is now also has DNS service which you can address container's by its DNS names.
On the other hand, there is CoreOS's Flannel and Juniper's Opencontrail for wiring the containers across the hosts.
Seems like docker swarm 1.14 allows you to:
assing hostname to container, using --hostname tag, but i haven't been able to make it work, containers are not able to ping each other by assigned hostnames.
assigning services to machine using --constraint 'node.hostname == <host>'