Docs not clear -- Chef Automation Viz setup

Chef Automate
1

I’m in the process of setting up Chef Automate to get a look and feel for it.

I have not had Delivery installed before this, so this is a fresh install against a single Chef Server with a small number of nodes.

In the docs Chef Automate > Setup > Enable Visibility, there is nothing about setting up a “data-collector” token UNLESS you have an existing Delivery installation.

In the docs Chef Automate > Managing the Server > Ingest Data… Both the client configuration and the server configuration references a “data-collector” token.

So this leaves me guessing as to what really needs to be done to configure data collection.

So what do I need to do here?

2

Hello!

No worries, you’re most of the way there. The token itself defaults to a value of ‘93a49a4f2482c64126f7b6015e6b0f30284287ee4054ff8807fb63d9cbd1c506’, and providing that token to clients/chef server should be sufficient to start populating visibility.

The quickest way to test would be to select a client node, and append its client.rb with the following:

data_collector.server_url "https://my-automate-server.mycompany.com/data-collector/v0/"
data_collector.token “TOKEN”

Where my-automate-server.mycompany.com is the FQDN of your automate server, and the string above should work for token if that value hasn’t been modified. At that point, if you run chef-client, you should start seeing data in visibility.

One caveat: If you’re using a self-signed certificate on the delivery server, we’ll need to trust this on the client explicitly. Easiest way to do that is to copy the automate server’s SSL certificate (by default this lives in /var/opt/delivery/nginx/ca/delivery.HOSTNAME.crt) to /etc/chef/trusted_certs on the node we’re evaluating.

Hope that helps! Let us know how it goes.

3

Thanks for the feedback on the docs as well – we are getting them cleaned up to be more clear.

Cheers,
Megan

4

Thanks for the help! I’m collecting and seeing in Visibility from client runs, not collecting from the Chef Server its self yet, but I’m not done troubleshooting myself on that part :wink: