Hearing a user speak is worth more than self-glorification! As we come up to year-end, it is time to start thinking about turkeys (well if you celebrate Thanksgiving like they do out here), and of course Christmas and the festive season it heralds. In this blog post I would like to thank a particular automation tool (no points for guessing which one), but really do so from the vantage point of a user and the progress they made with the tool. “Today I started learning CFEngine 3”. This was the title of an innocuous looking post from Remi on June 13’th 2013. In here he detailed his early experience attending a training session on CFEngine delivered by Diego Zamboni the author of Learning CFEngine 3. What stood out even back then and at first glance was that CFEngine is a pretty darn good monitoring tool. It is capable of fixing issues or reporting to the user.
CFEngine recently released version 3.6, which makes deploying and using cfengine easier than ever before. The greatest improvement in 3.6, in my opinion, is by far the autorun feature. I’m going to demonstrate how to get a policy server set up with autorun properly configured.
Installing CFEngine 3.6.2 The first step is to install the CFEngine package, which I’m not going to cover. But I will say that I recomend using an existing repository. Instructions on how to set this up are here. Or you can get binary packages here. If you’re not using Linux (like myself) you can get binary packages from cfengineers.net.If you’re inclined to build from source I expect that you don’t need my help with that. Having installed the CFEngine package, the first thing to do is to generate keys. The keys may have already been generated for you, but running the command again won’t harm anything.
In this installment we turn to Danilo Fernando Chilene who recently wrote about **monitoring CFEngine with Zabbix. **The original blog can be found at
http://bicofino.io/blog/2014/08/22/monitoring-cfengine-with-zabbix/. In this particular piece learn about how Zabbix can be leveraged to monitor processes, memory use and the promise summary log in the context of CFEngine. If you have other such stories of CFEngine use, we would love to hear back from you. Thanks Danilo for a great post! Monitoring CFEngine With Zabbix I created a template to monitor CFEngine with Zabbix. This allows the monitoring of processes, memory use and the promise summary log.
We recently announced the general availability of CFEngine Enterprise 3.6.1. One of the key capabilities added to this maintenance release is a supported upgrade process. In today’s post, I’ll walk you through an outline of the upgrade procedure, which will hopefully provide a good starting point for you to map out the entire process for your CFEngine deployment. Note that the examples here assume starting the upgrade from a CFEngine 3.5.x install, but the same steps are applicable to version 3.0 as well. Don’t forget to refer to our online documentation for the complete set of steps.
If you’ve seen what we have delivered with CFEngine Enterprise 3.6.0 earlier this summer, I’m sure you realized what a feature-rich release this turned out to be. But we didn’t stop there. The CFEngine team has spent the past few weeks validating additional platforms, building a simplified upgrade process, and in the process, even added a few small enhancements to the mix! Today, we’re announcing CFEngine Enterprise 3.6.1 - a maintenance release with a number of goodies that I’m sure you will appreciate. Expanded Platform Coverage CFEngine Enterprise 3.6.1 now supports the following host platforms to provide you with comprehensive coverage within your IT infrastructure.
Thanks to all of you who tuned in for our special webinar this week ‘Drive Financial Services Innovation Through IT Automation’. For those of you who could not attend, the recording is now available below - please be sure to watch and learn how CFEngine Enterprise 3.6.0 can enable your IT organization to automate applications and infrastructure specifically for challenges facing financial services firms:
You can also check out the slides here. Happy viewing!
Today’s financial services firms are operating in an IT environment of ever-increasing complexity, unprecedented regulatory requirements, and a need to move faster than ever before. In order to effectively compete in this new reality, firms are turning to IT automation as a way to scale their systems without sacrificing security, uptime, or compliance. Join us for a special webinar this Thursday July 17th to learn about the new CFEngine Enterprise 3.6.0 and how it can enable your IT organization to automate applications and infrastructure specifically for the challenges facing financial services firms today. Attend this live event to learn how CFEngine Enterprise 3.6.0 can enable your financial services organization to:
As any of you know, CFEngine was a proud Gold Sponsor of the Silicon Valley 2014 DevOps Days Conference last month in Mountain View, along with other industry-leading sponsors such as IBM, CA Technologies, Dell, and Red Hat. If you were unable to attend this sold-out event, we are pleased to announce that a recording of CFEngine CTO Mark Burgess’s talk on ‘The Future of Configuration Management’ is now available online! You can watch Mark’s talk here. To learn more about DevOps Days and find a future event near you, please check out the conference website. We hope to see you at the next event!
Thanks to all of you who tuned in for our ‘Introduction to CFEngine Enterprise 3.6.0’ Webinars last week. For those of you who could not attend, the recording is now available below - please be sure to watch and learn about CFEngine Enterprise 3.6.0 can help you:
Proactively alert on policy drifts in your environment through a simple-to-use, configurable dashboard Gain comprehensive visibility into your IT infrastructure with enhanced compliance and extensible inventory reporting Leverage new language abstractions to improve administration productivity Achieve painless integration with other IT systems using native JSON support
Join CFEngine partner Vertical Sysadmin for a free webinar this Thursday - Getting Started with CFEngine: Basic Concepts and Q&A. This event will cover topics from high-level system architecture to the anatomy of writing a promise to help you get productive quickly with CFEngine. Specific items to be covered include:
Basic terms - Promises, Bundles, Bodies, and Classes Language concepts Common promise types, attributes, and syntax Design Center sketches GUI features of CFEngine Enterprise Date: Thursday, July 10, 2014 Time: 9:00 am to 10:00am London UK, 4:00pm to 5:00pm Singapore (SGT) Register today!
