What’s new?

During recent weeks we’ve been coding and performing several changes to Citellus and Magui.

Checking the latest logs or list of issues open and closed on github is probably not an easy task or the best way to get ‘up-to-date’ with changes, so I’ll try to compile a few here.

First of all, we’re going to present it at DevConf.cz 2018, so come stop-by if assisting :-)

Some of the changes include…

Citellus

  • New functions for bash scripts!
    • We’ve created lot of functions to check different things:
      • installed rpm
      • rpm over specific version
      • compare dates over X days
      • regexp in file
      • etc..
    • Functions do allow to do quicker plugin development.
  • save/restore options so they can be loaded automatically for each execution
    • Think of enabled filters, excluded, etc
  • metadata added for plugins and returned as dictionary
  • plugin has a unique ID for all installations based on plugin relative path and plugin name
    • We do use that ID in magui to select the plugin data we’ll be acting on
  • plugin priority!
    • Plugins are assigned a number between 0 and 1000 that represents how likely it’s going to affect your environment, and you can filter also on it with --prio
  • extended via ’extensions’ to provide support for other plugins
    • moved prior plugins to be core extension
    • ansible playbook support via ansible-playbook command
    • metadata plugins that just generate metadata (hostname, date for sosreport, etc)
  • Web Interface!!
    • David Valee Delisle did a great job on preparing an html that loads citellus.json and shows it graphically.
    • Thanks to his work, we did extended some other features like priority, categories, etc that are calculated via citellus and consumed via citellus-www.
    • Interface can also load magui.json (with ?json=magui.json) and show it’s output.
    • We did extend citellus to take --web to automatically create the json named citellus.json on the folder specified with -o and copy the citellus.html file there. So if you provide sosreports over http, you can point to citellus.html to see graphical status! (check latest image at citellus website as www.png )
  • Increased plugin count!
    • Now we do have more than 119 across different categories
    • A new plugin in python reboot.py that checks for unexpected reboots
    • Spectre/Meltdown security checks!

Magui

  • If there’s an existing citellus.json magui does load it to speed it up process across multiple sosreports.
  • Magui can also use ansible-playbook to copy citellus program to remote host and run there the command, and bring back the generated citellus.json so you can quickly run citellus across several hosts without having to manually perform operations or generate sosreports.
  • Moved prior data to two plugins:
    • citellus-outputs
      • Citellus plugins output arranged by plugin and sosreport
    • citellus-metadata
      • Outputs metadata gathered by metadata plugins in citellus arranged by plugin and sosreport
  • First plugins that compare data received from citellus on global level
    • Plugins are written in python and use each plugin id to just work on the data they know how to process
    • pipeline-yaml
      • Checks if pipeline.yaml and warns if is different across hosts
    • seqno
      • Checks latest galera seqno on hosts
    • release
      • Reports RHEL release across hosts and warns if is different across hosts
  • Enable quiet mode on the data received from citellus as well as local plugins, so only outputs with ERROR or different output on sosreports is shown, even on magui plugins.

Wrap up!

As you can see we’ve been busy trying to improve plugins, Citellus framework and Magui as well.

We’ve been also busy demonstrating to others it’s value and raising lot of new issues and closing them with our commits (294 requests closed so far).

So, come and tell us what else are you missing or how can we improve it to suit your needs (or code them yourself and submit a review!)

Enjoy! (and if you do, you can Buy Me a Coffee )