Meerkat

Meerkat is a utility to create and share dashboards for Icinga 2 checks and hosts. It is comprised of a lightweight Go server and a browser front-end written in Preact. It's quick to setup and easy to use.

Not developing Meerkat? See the Meerkat website at https://meerkat.run

Getting started

To install and setup Meerkat locally follow these steps.

Installation

1. Download the installation script and make executable.

   cd /tmp
   wget https://github.com/meerkat-dashboard/meerkat/raw/main/contrib/download-install-latest-release.sh
   chmod +x download-install-latest-release.sh

2. Run setup script.

   Usage: download-install-latest-release.sh --port PORT --user USER [--label LABEL] [--cert-name CERT_NAME] [--release-url RELEASE_URL]
   --user        User for the meerkat instance
   --port        Port for the meerkat instance
   --label       Unique label for the meerkat instance under /usr/local/meerkat
   --cert-name   Name for the SSL certificate
   --release-url URL of the meerkat release to download from GitHub

   Standard installation

   sudo ./download-install-latest-release.sh --port 8080 --user meerkat

Multiple Meerkat installation

The below would install meerkat to different directories and run it on different ports.

sudo ./download-install-latest-release.sh --port 8080 --user meerkat --label foo
sudo ./download-install-latest-release.sh --port 8081 --user meerkat --label bar

These will have different configuration files, install directories and service name based on the label. Service Name: meerkat-foo, meerkat-bar Config: /etc/meerkat-foo.toml, /etc/meerkat-bar.toml Install Directory: /usr/local/meerkat-foo/, /usr/local/meerkat-bar/

Configuration

To configure Meerkat you must edit the meerkat.toml config file (Default location is /etc/meerkat.toml)

# The address, in host:port format, to serve meerkat from. For example 0.0.0.0:8080. 
# The default is “:8080” i.e. all IPv4, IPv6 addresses port 8080.
HTTPAddr = "0.0.0.0:8080"

# The URL for an instance of Icinga serving the Icinga API
IcingaURL = "https://127.0.0.1:5665"

# The username and password with which to authenticate to Icinga. 
# Normally set in /etc/icinga2/conf.d/api-users.conf on your Icinga2 master.
IcingaUsername = "meerkat"
IcingaPassword = "YOUR SECURE PASSWORD HERE"

# If IcingaInsecureTLS to true, verification of the TLS certificates served by the Icinga API is skipped. 
# This is usually required when Icinga is configured with self-signed certificates.
#IcingaInsecureTLS = true

# If events havent been received for the value of IcingaEventTimeout in seconds then resubscribe to the event stream.
IcingaEventTimeout = 30

# If SSLEnable to true, meerkat will serve data over http2 using the crt and key.
# A ssl cert and key is required if you enable ssl.
# This option is required for multiple dashboards to function, Meerkat uses eventstreams which are limited in http1, http2 has a higher limit.
SSLEnable = true
SSLCert = ""
SSLKey = ""

# If LogFile is true, meerkat will log to file.
LogFile = true
# If LogConsole is true, meerkat will log to console.
LogConsole = false
# Path to folder to store log files. 
LogDirectory = "log/"

# If IcingaDebug set to true meerkat will output icinga api debug information.
IcingaDebug = false

Development

Meerkat development requires supported releases of Go and Node.js. See the Go installation and Node.js install documentation. Devolopment with older toolchains may be ok but we can't guarantee the behaviour.

Quickstart

A typical workflow involves starting a filesystem watcher to rebuild the UI on changes:

cd ui
npm run dev

Then run another command to start meerkat with go run:

go run ./cmd/meerkat -ui ui

The ui flag sets meerkat to serve the UI bundle from the ui directory. This means subsequent changes to the UI will be served without requiring a rebuild of the entire command.

For more detail on each stage, keep reading.

Development workflow

Another workflow involves running local test suites, then building and running the program for manual testing.

As before, start by installing javascript dependencies:

cd ui
npm ci

Throughout development, tests can be run via go test. This includes Javascript tests. To run all tests:

go test ./...

Finally, build the UI and the server and run meerkat:

cd ui
npm run build
cd ../cmd/meerkat
go build
./meerkat

By default, meerkat listens on the address http://127.0.0.1:8080. Open meerkat and have a click around!

For command usage, see cmd/meerkat. For a configuration file reference, see Configuration.

Contributing

Test

Before submitting a change, ensure code is formatted:

go fmt
cd ui
npm run lint

Run all the tests from the root of the project:

go test ./...

Commit message

Commit messages follow the same format used by the Go project (among others). The commit subject starts with the affected package name then a brief description of the change. The body may contain an explanation of the change and why it was made. See commit 4603601 for an example.

Configuring Icinga

Meerkat communicates with Icinga via its HTTP API. This requires authentication. Here is an example ApiUser object with limited, read-only privileges:

object ApiUser "meerkat" {
    password = "meerkat"
    permissions = [ "objects/query/Host", "objects/query/Service", "objects/query/ServiceGroup", "objects/query/HostGroup", "events/StateChange" , "events/CheckResult", "events/AcknowledgementSet", "events/AcknowledgementCleared", "status/query" ] 
}

In a default Icinga2 installation, you can write this definition to /etc/icinga2/conf.d/api-users.conf.

Support

Sol1 is an official Icinga Enterprise Partner, and can offer commercial support for Meerkat and Icinga and friends. We are a friendly bunch of people, so please don't hesitate to get in touch at https://sol1.com.au.

Contributing

We welcome any contributions. Let us know via the issues here if there is something you need fixed up, or even better, a patch or PR would be most appreciated.

Sounds from Notification Sounds provided under the creative commons 4.0 license

License is GNU Affero GPLv3.