SignalFx Cloud Foundry Agent Buildpack Decorator

This is a decorator built for use with the Cloud Foundry meta-buildpack. The decorator installs the SignalFx collectd agent into the same droplet as the application being running. This is useful to monitor web servers running in the CF Garden environment.

Usage

First you have to add the meta-buildpack and this decorator to your Cloud Foundry environment. To add this decorator, download a release zip from Github and push it to CF with the create-buildpack command.

Configuration

Next, create a directory called .signalfx in your app that contains collectd configuration files specific to what you want to monitor. This buildpack is configured out of the box to report only specific metadata about the container and nothing else (e.g. no metrics for CPU, memory, network, etc.). Our Firehose nozzle sends basic container metrics (CPU, memory, and disk usage), which might be enough depending on your needs. If you do add back these to the collectd config, note that they will be double reported.

To configure the API token for SignalFx, add an envvar to your application manifest called SIGNALFX_ACCESS_TOKEN with that value.

If you would like to enable system metrics inside the containers (i.e. to be able to use the collectd dashboards to view your containers), set the envvar SIGNALFX_ENABLE_SYSTEM_METRICS to either true or yes. System metrics are by default disabled, so only the metrics specified by configuration in the .signalfx dir will be sent without this setting.

If you need to monitor an application through JMX inside your container, you can enable JMX support by adding the envvar ENABLE_JMX=true in your app manifest. Do not enable this unless you need it, since enabling Java in collectd causes it to consume significantly greater amounts of memory.

Versioning

This buildpack follows the versioning of the collectd-bundle. If there are multiple releases within a single release of the collectd bundle, they will be indicated by a .<num> suffix, where num starts with 1. The first release with a new collectd bundle does not have that suffix.

Dev Notes

This buildpack depends on our collectd bundle. Grab the desired bundle archive version (it's a .tar.gz file) and stick it in this dir. Then run make signalfx_decorator.zip to create the buildpack zip with that bundle.