OMS – Agent for Linux Installation (Preview)

Operational Management Suite (OMS) is probably the final product of a long evolution process starting back in 2011 known as System Center Advisor, later on transforming into Microsoft Azure Operational Insight and finally into a growing management suite for Azure and on-premise services. Read my post here for more historical information on this awesome solution.

I think it is a historical move for Microsoft to support Open Source and Linux track the relationship goes even that far, Microsoft writes “love blog posts (not love letters :))” Microsoft Loves Linux, read the blog post series here. Because of that I would like to show how OMS supports Linux data collection.

The OMS Agent for Linux enables rich and real-time analytics for operational data (Syslog, Performance, Alerts, Inventory) from Linux servers, Docker Containers and monitoring tools like Nagios, Zabbix and System Center

Currently this Linux agent is in a preview stage and supports at this very moment the following operating systems…

• Amazon Linux 2012.09 –> 2015.09 (x86/x64)
• CentOS Linux 5,6, and 7 (x86/x64)
• Oracle Enterprise Linux 5,6, and 7 (x86/x64)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5,6 and 7 (x86/x64)
• Debian GNU/Linux 6, 7, and 8 (x86/x64)
• Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, 14.04 LTS, 15.04 (x86/x64)
• SUSE Linux Enteprise Server 11 and 12 (x86/x64)

As things move fast this list will change within the next weeks / months. Keep an eye on GitHub where you find up-to-date information.

The amazing thing is, that the agent is built on open source components and for collecting the data and the aggregate it uses FluentD . FluentD has hundreds of existing plugins, which will make it really easy for you to add new data sources. So this perfectly to collect whatever data you want.

Pre-requisites:

In order to install successfully the agent you need to make sure the following packages are installed…

In addition if you want to collect syslog data either rsyslog or syslog-ng are required to collect syslog messages. The default syslog daemon on version 5 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Oracle Linux version (sysklog) is not supported for syslog event collection. To collect syslog data from this version of these distributions, the rsyslog daemon should be installed and configured to replace sysklog,

Installation:

Some of us are just Microsoft geeks and might not know too much about Linux. So here I set first hostname of the Linux server, in my case it is a SUSE Enterprise Linux 12 and running uname –m shows me x86_64 which tells me it is a x64 bit server.

Download the agent from GitHub https://github.com/MSFTOSSMgmt/OMS-Agent-for-Linux

or us wget

wget https://github.com/MSFTOSSMgmt/OMS-Agent-for-Linux/releases/download/1.0.0-47/omsagent-1.0.0-47.universal.x64.sh

Check the md5 checksum md5sum ./omsagent-1.0.0-47.universal.x64.sh and install the agent sudo sh ./omsagent-1.0.0-47.universal.x64.sh –install -w <YOUR OMS WORKSPACE ID> -s <YOUR OMS WORKSPACE PRIMARY KEY>. Get your WORKSPACE ID and PRIMARY KEY from the OMS portal by logging in into http://www.microsoft.com/oms… 

…the installation should run like this…

…immediately you should see the agent has connected… 

Checks:

To see what data floating in there are multiple places to check.

First check you installation by running the command service omsagent status…

Go to the Log Search in OMS and type a query like this Computer=suse007 Type=Perf of course change the computer name accordingly…

…and some graphical details should appear…

Conclusion:

This is the basic installation of a single OMS Linux agent. It goes without a hitch, if you make sure you have the proper libraries installed and supported OS versions. Microsoft does the right move to support and contribute to Open Source, it even does it very well in a good quality and it reflects this strategy in other products / tools as well. Great!