Rackspace Cloud Monitoring Agent

The Rackspace cloud monitoring agent allows you to monitor CPU, memory, filesystem usage and system processes. It does this by collecting information about the system and pushing it out to Rackspace Cloud Monitoring web services, where they can be analyzed, graphed, and alerted on. It is this technology that the Rackspace monitoring checks are built upon.

Plus you get a nice pretty little bar graph in the server details section of the control panel 🙂

Install the Agent

While the instructions used here are for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, this page lists the exact commands needed for all major distros.

wget http://meta.packages.cloudmonitoring.rackspace.com/ubuntu-14.04-x86_64/rackspace-cloud-monitoring-meta-stable_1.0_all.deb
dpkg -i rackspace-cloud-monitoring-meta-stable_1.0_all.deb
apt-get update
apt-get install rackspace-monitoring-agent

If your distribution of choice isn’t listed, you can always install from source.

Configure and Start Daemon

If the /etc/rackspace-monitoring-agent.cfg file isn’t present, you will need to choose one of the methods below to start the service.

Quick Method

Run the below commands, replacing the username and API key with your own.

rackspace-monitoring-agent --setup --username <your-username> --apikey <your-api-key>
rackspace-monitoring-agent start -D

Interactive Method

Alternatively you can simply run the below to interactively enter your username and your API key or password.

rackspace-monitoring-agent --setup

Followed by…

service rackspace-monitoring-agent start

Updating

The monitoring agent does not update itself. However, if you installed using a package manager, such as apt-get, agent updates will be pulled in and applied with regular system updates anyway.

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

Uninstalling the Agent

Assuming you didn’t install from source and you used your distros package manager, you will uninstall with the same method. I am using Ubuntu, so…

apt-get remove rackspace-monitoring-agent

Or if you’re using CentOS/RHEL.

yum remove rackspace-monitoring-agent

Related Documents

https://github.com/virgo-agent-toolkit/rackspace-monitoring-agent

http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/install-and-configure-the-cloud-monitoring-agent#UpgradeAgent

http://meta.packages.cloudmonitoring.rackspace.com/

http://docs.rackspace.com/cm/api/v1.0/cm-devguide/content/install-configure.html

http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/about-the-cloud-monitoring-agent