internet_box_logger

InternetBoxLogger

## Overview

The goal of this gem is to provide an easy way to monitor your internet box status. The idea is to gather as much data as you can about your box, and regularly store the metrics into an ElasticSearch server/cluster in order to provide a Kibana dashboard on top to visualize the metrics.

It primarily targets the box I am using (the Freebox V5 from the 'Free' french ISP).

Currently supported box:

• Freebox V5

Installation

Dependencies

You need to have ELK installed, the fantastic software trilogy that brings you the power of analytics at your fingertips. In our case we just need ElasticSearch and Kibana, LogStash is not needed, but you should not prevent yourself from using it for log files of your own...

Follow ELK installation procedure before installing this Gem.

Gem installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'internet_box_logger'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install internet_box_logger

Configuration

Configuration, thanks to EasyAppHelper, enables multiple places to store your configuration. But most useful ones should be:

• '/etc/internet_box_logger.conf' for a system-wide installation
• '~/.config/internet_box_logger.conf' for a user-specific installation

The default configuration is the following in YAML format:

box_type: InternetBoxLogger::Parsers::FreeboxV5Parser

cron_interval: 1

kibana_path: /opt/kibana

server_port: 5000

elastic_servers:
  - 127.0.0.1:9200
elastic_binary: /opt/elasticsearch/bin/elasticsearch

• box_type specifies the module in charge of gathering data from your box. it Should not be changed but you can define your own. It is the way for you to add other types of boxes if needed. If you do so, please do a pull-request afterwards.
• cron_interval defines the time in minutes between two measurements.
• kibana_path defines where your Kibana is installed. This one is only used by a rake task to setup default dashboards for your box. This is not really needed for the script to work.
• server_port defines the port to run a simple HTTP server to serve the Kibana UI.
• elastic_servers You can specify here, how to reach your ElasticSearch cluster. If you did the default install of ElasticSearch on the same machine as the gem is installed, then it should already be the correct host:port.
• elastic_binary defines where your ElasticSearch is installed. This one is only used by a rake task (to stop/start and get info) about the ElasticSearch cluster. This is not really needed for the log process to work. Only to enable stop/start of the server.

These values are the default and you don't need to create a new config file if they already fit your needs. And it should be the case if you installed ELK as a whole on the machine you are using this gem.

You can deploy every component separately and in this case you nay have to tweak the configuration.

Most probably if you installed ELK locally, your config file may look like:

kibana_path: <the_place_where_I_installed_Kibana>
elastic_binary: <the_path_to_the_elasticsearch_binary>

Usage

This Gem brings basically an executable 'internet_box_logger' that will save the state of your box into an ElasticSearch instance.

The script supports the following options that you can see with the --help options:

-- Generic options -------------------------------------------------------------
        --auto                 Auto mode. Bypasses questions to user.
        --simulate             Do not perform the actual underlying actions.
    -v, --verbose              Enable verbose mode.
    -h, --help                 Displays this help.
-- Configuration options -------------------------------------------------------
        --config-file          Specify a config file.
        --config-override      If specified override all other config.
-- Debug and logging options ---------------------------------------------------
        --debug                Run in debug mode.
        --debug-on-err         Run in debug mode with output to stderr.
        --log-level            Log level from 0 to 5, default 2.
        --log-file             File to log to.
-- Script specific -------------------------------------------------------------
        --cron_interval        Specify the interval at which the measurements will be done
        --cron_remove          Remove the Cron task
        --cron_setup           Setup the Cron task
        --deploy_reports       Deploy boxes dashboards to Kibana default folder
        --es_start             Starts the ElasticSearch server if installed locally and properly configured
        --es_stop              Stops the ElasticSearch server if installed locally and properly configured
        --serve                Runs a simple web server to serve Kibana UI
        --server_port          Specify server port if you use the "--serve" option

On top of this the gem brings a set of rake tasks in case you bundle this gem in your own project.

The rake tasks provided are:

rake internet_box_logger:cron:info           # Show your Cron config
rake internet_box_logger:cron:remove         # Removes cron task
rake internet_box_logger:cron:setup          # Setup cron to gather information every x minutes (configurable)
rake internet_box_logger:es:info             # Show your local ElasticSearch config
rake internet_box_logger:es:start            # Starts your local ElasticSearch server
rake internet_box_logger:es:stop             # Stops your local ElasticSearch server
rake internet_box_logger:kibana:deploy       # Deploys box specific reports into Kibana dashboards directory
rake internet_box_logger:kibana:info         # Displays Kibana information
rake internet_box_logger:kibana:serve[port]  # Launch a simple server to serve Kibana UI

Script vs rake mode

As stated, the gem supports two way to interact:

• The internet_box_logger script provided with the gem
• The rake tasks provided with the gem when you use it in your own projects

Most commands are actually same, and the following commands have the same effect:

rake internet_box_logger:cron:setup	internet_box_logger -v --cron-setup
rake internet_box_logger:cron:remove	internet_box_logger -v --cron-remove
rake internet_box_logger:es:start	internet_box_logger -v --es-start
rake internet_box_logger:es:stop	internet_box_logger -v --es-stop
rake internet_box_logger:kibana:deploy	internet_box_logger -v --deploy-reports
rake internet_box_logger:kibana:serve	internet_box_logger -v --serve
rake internet_box_logger:kibana:serve[1234] (*)	internet_box_logger -v --serve --server-port 1234

(*) Warning, if you are using zsh, you may probably have to escape the brackets with backslashes.

Starting to monitor your box

You have to have:

• A running instance of ElasticSearch. If it is installed locally and the path to your ElasticSearch binary is correctly set in your config file, you can use the command line or the rake task (if you use this gem in your project) to start/stop it.
• A place where kibana is installed
• Setup correctly the kibana_path in your config and run either the the command line or the rake task (if you use this gem in your project) to deploy the reports to Kibana. Alternatively, you can manually copy the JSON files stored in the config/kibana_reports directory to where your Kibana is install in the app/dashboards sub-directory.
• An http server to serve the Kibana UI. You can use the mini embedded server and you can use the command line or the rake task (if you use this gem in your project) to start/stop it (a correctly defined kibana_path in your config is required). Alternatively you can serve it with a server of your own.
• Setup the CRON task that will schedule the log into elastic search. You can use the command line or the rake task (if you use this gem in your project) to setup/remove the CRON task and you can verify it with crontab -l. Alternatively, you can create the cron entry fully manually or call the internet_box_logger from your own scheduler.

Then provided you started the embedded server you just need to navigate to:

http://localhost:5000/#/dashboard/file/FreeboxV5_report.json

This url is for the Freebox V5 which is the currently only one supported.

Contributing

• Fork it
• Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
• Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
• Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
• Create new Pull Request

Basically, to contribute you may want to:

• create the module to gather information from your box.
• Update the tests accordingly
• build the Kibana report to display information.

Code

The contract is pretty simple. Create a module to gather your box's data into the InternetBoxLogger::Parsers namespace (module). This module should implement two methods:

• get_box_data that returns a hash of key-value pairs representing the data you want to monitor from your box. The way you get these is not important. In the case of the Freebox V5 the sole possibility is to parse a page returned by the box itself and than contains a lot of metrics. But maybe your box provides a more sophisticated API, REST or whatever.
• as_es_documents should return an array of documents (hashes) in the ElasticSearch way of thinking. This should be the transformation of the data returned by get_box_data, and organised as an array of documents. This way you can organize your data in a way that will allow you to query this data from Kibana to build your dashboards.

Then you have to specify this new parser in the configuration file using the box_type property (see the default value in the upper part of this help to see how to do it).

Tests

You should upgrade the test set to cover what you added.

Dashboard

You should add a new report into config/kibana_reports. The filename should end by "_report.json" to be taken in account by the script and rake tasks.

That's all folks.