IBM AIX

Sensu on IBM AIX

Install Sensu Core

IMPORTANT: Sensu Core reached end-of-life (EOL) on December 31, 2019, and we permanently removed the Sensu EOL repository on February 1, 2021.

This means the packages specified in the instructions below are no longer available. To migrate to Sensu Go, read the Sensu Core migration guide.

Sensu Core is installed on IBM AIX systems via a native system installer package (i.e. a .bff file).

Download and install Sensu using the Sensu .bff package

NOTE: As of Sensu version 0.27 repository URLs have changed. To install or upgrade to the latest version of Sensu, please ensure you have updated existing configurations to follow the repository URL format specified below.

  1. Download the Sensu AIX package.

  2. The Sensu installer package for IBM AIX systems is provided in backup file format (.bff). In order to install the content, you will need to know the “Fileset Name”. Display the content using the installp utility. 

    installp -ld sensu-1.4.1-1.powerpc.bff
    Once you have collected the fileset name, you can optionally proceed to preview installation using the installp utility, with the -p (preview) flag. 
    installp -apXY -d sensu-1.4.1-1.powerpc.bff sensu

  3. Install Sensu using the installp utility. 

    installp -aXY -d sensu-1.4.1-1.powerpc.bff sensu
    NOTE: this command uses the following installp utilty flags: -a to apply changes to the system, -X to extend the file system, and -Y to accept the Sensu MIT License.

  4. Configure the Sensu client. No “default” configuration is provided with Sensu, so the Sensu Client will not start without the corresponding configuration. Please refer to the “Configure Sensu” section (below) for more information on configuring Sensu. At minimum, the Sensu client will need a working transport definition and client definition.

Configure Sensu

By default, all of the Sensu services on IBM AIX systems will load configuration from the following locations:

  • /etc/sensu/config.json
  • /etc/sensu/conf.d/**/*.json

NOTE: additional or alternative configuration file and directory locations may be used by modifying Sensu’s service configuration and/or by starting the Sensu services with the corresponding CLI arguments. For more information, please consult the Sensu Configuration reference documentation.

The following Sensu configuration files are provided as examples. Please review the Sensu configuration reference documentation for additional information on how Sensu is configured.

Create the Sensu configuration directory

In some cases, the default Sensu configuration directory (i.e. /etc/sensu/conf.d/) is not created by the Sensu installer, in which case it is necessary to create this directory manually.

mkdir /etc/sensu/conf.d

Example client configuration

  1. Copy the following contents to a configuration file located at /etc/sensu/conf.d/client.json: 
    {
  "client": {
    "name": "aix-client",
    "address": "localhost",
    "environment": "development",
    "subscriptions": [
      "dev",
      "aix-hosts"
    ],
    "socket": {
      "bind": "127.0.0.1",
      "port": 3030
    }
  }
}

Example Transport Configuration

At minimum, the Sensu client process requires configuration to tell it how to connect to the configured Sensu Transport.

  1. Copy the following contents to a configuration file located at /etc/sensu/conf.d/transport.json: 

    {
  "transport": {
    "name": "rabbitmq",
    "reconnect_on_error": true
  }
}
    NOTE: if you are using Redis as your transport, please use "name": "redis" for your transport configuration. For more information, please visit the transport definition specification.

  2. If the transport being used is running on a different host, additional configuration is required to tell the sensu client how to connect to the transport. Please see Redis or RabbitMQ reference documentation for examples.

Operating Sensu

Managing the Sensu client process

Start or stop the Sensu client using the startsrc and stopsrc utilities:

startsrc -s sensu-client
stopsrc -s sensu-client

Rotating Sensu Logs

Sensu comes packaged with logrotate rules. However, on AIX, you’ll need to install an additional package to take advantage of those rules. You can install the logrotate package listed here. Once installed, the rules present in /etc/logrotate.d/sensu will be used.

Known limitations

Please note the following platform-specific limitations affecting Sensu on AIX at this time. Unless otherwise stated, all documented functions of the Sensu client are supported.

Foreign Function Interface

Foreign Function Interface (FFI) calls on Sensu’s embedded Ruby on AIX are not working at this time, so any Ruby-based Sensu plugins that require FFI will not work (however all other plugins should work). It is possible that FFI support will be enabled in a future release.