Shinken High Availability

Shinken makes it easy to have a high availability architecture. Just as easily as the load balancing feature at distributed shinken

Shinken is business friendly when it comes to meeting availability requirements.

You learned how to add new poller satellites in the distributed shinken. For the HA the process is the same You just need to add new satellites in the same way, then define them as “spares”.

You can (should) do the same for all the satellites for a complete HA architecture.

Install all spares daemons on server3

We keep the load balancing of the previous installation and we add a new server (if you do not need load balancing, just take the previous server). This new HA server will be server3 (server2 was for poller load balancing).

So like the previous case, you need to install the daemons but not launch them for now. Look at the 10 min start tutorial to know how to install them on server3.

Declare these spares on server1

Daemons on the server1 need to know where their spares are. Everything is done in the /etc/shinken directory. Each daemon has its own directory into /etc/shinken

Add theses lines regarding the daemon (ex schedulers/scheduler-spare.cfg):

define scheduler{

     scheduler_name   scheduler-spare
     address          server3
     port             7768
     spare            1
     }


define poller{

     poller_name     poller-spare
     address         server3
     port            7771
     spare           1
}


define reactionner{

     reactionner_name reactionner-spare
     address          server3
     port             7769
     spare            1
     }


define receiver{

     receiver_name    receiver-spare
     address          server3
     port             7773
     spare            1
}


define broker{

     broker_name     broker-spare
     address         server3
     port            7772
     spare           1
     modules         Simple-log,Livestatus
}


define arbiter{

     arbiter_name    arbiter-spare
     address         server3
     host_name       server3
     port            7770
     spare           1
}

Ok. Configuring HA is defining new daemons on server3 as “spare 1”.

WAIT! There are 2 main pitfalls that can halt HA in its tracks:
  • Modules - If your master daemon has modules, you must add them on the spare as well!!!!
  • Hostname - arbiter-spare has a host_name parameter: it must be the hostname of server3 (so in 99% of the cases, server3). Launch hostname to know the name of your server. If the value is incorrect, the spare arbiter won’t start!

Copy all configuration from server1 to server3

Important

It’s very important that the two arbiter daemons have the same /etc/shinken directory. The whole configuration should also be rsync’ed or copied once a day to ensure the spare arbiter can take over in case of a massive failure of active arbiter.

So copy it in the server3 (overwrite the old one) in the same place.

You do not need to sync all configuration files for hosts and services in the spare. When the master starts, it will synchronize with the spare. But beware, if server1 dies and you must start from fresh on server3, you will not have the full configuration! So synchronize the whole configuration once a day using rsync or other similar method, it is a requirement.

Start :)

Ok, everything is ready. All you need now is to start all the daemons:

$server1: sudo /etc/init.d/shinken start
$server3: sudo /etc/init.d/shinken start

If an active daemon die, the spare will take over. This is detected in a minute or 2 (you can change it in the daemons/deamon-spare.cfg, for each daemon).

Note

For stateful fail-over of a scheduler, link one of the distributed retention modules such as memcache or redis to your schedulers. This will avoid losing the current state of the checks handled by a failed scheduler. Without a retention module, the spare scheduler taking over will need to reschedule all checks and check states will be PENDING until this has completed.

Note

You now have a high availability architecture.

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