I am using New Relic to monitor my Salt managed EC2 servers, and I am trying to insert a "hostname=minion-name" in the newrelic-sysmond confic file, so they show up in New Relic's dashboard with a reconizable name, instead of the EC2 default "ip-123-133...".
I spin my instances with salt-cloud and then apply the following state (trough the top file) to get New Relic sysmond running:
newrelic-repo:
pkg:
- installed
- require:
- pkgrepo: <my private repo defined elsewhere, just convenient rpm storage>
newrelic-sysmond:
pkg:
- installed
- require:
- pkg: newrelic-repo
service:
- running
- watch:
- file: /etc/newrelic/nrsysmond.cfg
/etc/newrelic/nrsysmond.cfg:
file.managed:
- source: salt://newrelic/nrsysmond.cfg
- user: newrelic
- mode: 744
- require:
- pkg: newrelic-sysmond
The crux is: /etc/newrelic/nrsysmond.cfg managed file is a version with my personal account key, required by New Relic setup, so it is the same for all my machines.
Is there a way for me have something like hostname=my_placeholder in that file and then in my sls config have it so that when the state is applied that my_placeholder becomes the minion name?
Digging trough the states.file doc (http://docs.saltstack.com/ref/states/all/salt.states.file.html) I get the feeling it is possible, but I am missing some foundational knowledge to figure it out, as I am just getting started with salt. Mainly I think I just need a nudge in a way as to how to reference the variable/grain holding the minion name, and an example of defaults/contexts in use.
First, you have to enable templating of this config file:
/etc/newrelic/nrsysmond.cfg:
file.managed:
- source: salt://newrelic/nrsysmond.cfg
- user: newrelic
- mode: '0744'
- template: jinja
- require:
- pkg: newrelic-sysmond
And then this file is treated as jinja template:
hostname={{ grains["id"] }}
The name of the minion is available in grains["id"]. You can run salt-call grains.items to see available grains.