Install/Setup

Installation and Setup

So it occurred to me that I completely forgot to post an abbreviated installation and setup for Sensu, which in my opinion is a pretty important point. So the following is a brief checklist of steps that need to be taken in order to install and setup a basic Sensu framework (CentOS). This information was summarized from http://sensuapp.org/docs/latest/guide.

• To begin you will need two machines for a basic setup. These two machines will be referred to as the 'server' and the 'client'.
• On the 'server' machine, you will need to generate SSL certificates for Sensu and install both RabbitMQ and Redis.
• Installing RabbitMQ will involve installing dependencies, installing RabbitMQ, configuring SSL, and adding user credentials.
• Installing Redis is very simple, a yum install is all that is needed (given the dependencies are already installed).
• On both the 'server' and 'client' systems you will then need to install Sensu and create the appropriate SSL locations and move the previously generated certificate files into place.
• Now you will configure the Sensu connection, Sensu API, and Sensu clients. The Sensu connection and Sensu clients will be setup up on both systems, while the Sensu API is configured on the 'server' machine only. Configuration is done entirely by creating/editing JSON files within /etc/sensu/
• After these steps have been completed (correctly) you should be able to enable and start up the sensu-server, sensu-api, and sensu-client on the 'server' machine; and enable/start the sensu-client on the 'client' machine.
• Dashboard: In previous versions of Sensu a dashboard was provided within the package. However, the more current releases no longer include this feature and the Sensu Installation Guide recommends using Uchiwa as the Sensu dashboard, as it is up to date with the latest Sensu API changes.
• Uchiwa in provided via a yum package and is configured in a JSON file under /etc/sensu/