Installation of InfluxDB Kapacitor on Nodegrid OS

Installation of InfluxDB Kapacitor

Overview

InfluxDB Kapacitor is a distributed data collector and aggregator that works with InfluxDB's telegraf agent, which is natively available on Nodegrid.

To collect and aggregate data in a local environment before sending the data to the backend database might be required to install Kapacitor on one or multiple Nodegrid appliances.

As Kapacitor is a self-contained application written in golang and supports Linux, can the application be installed directly on Nodegrid without the need to deploy it as a docker container?

This guide covers the required installation steps to install the kapacitor service and how to run the service at start-up.

Depending on the use case, customers can install software binaries as part of a specific user or for global installation as root users. However, this guide assumes the packages will be installed by the default admin account as root user.

Reference:

• Kapacitor 1.6 Installation Documentation
• Kapacitor download page

Installation

The installation requires the following steps:

• Get the Download link for Kapacitor
• Connect to Nodegrid root shell
• Download Kapacitor to Nodegrid OS
• Updating the users PATH variable to include InfluxDB Kapacitor
• Create init.d start-up script
• Adding init.d start/stop/status script to system start-up

The following table outlines the most common details and commands.

Get the Download link for Kapacitor

• Navigtae to Kapacitor download page
• Look under InfluxDB Version 1 for the current Kapacitor download version. Select as Platform Linux Binaries (64-bit)
  
• Copy and Note the URL for the download, for example: https://dl.influxdata.com/kapacitor/releases/kapacitor-1.6.6_linux_amd64.tar.gz

Connect to Nodegrid root shell

• Open a cli connection as admin user
• switch the root shell with the following command

shell sudo su -

Download and Install Kapacitor to Nodegrid OS

• Download the tar.gz file to Nodegrdi using the noted URL

wget https://dl.influxdata.com/kapacitor/releases/kapacitor-1.6.6_linux_amd64.tar.gz
tar xvfz kapacitor-1.6.6_linux_amd64.tar.gz -C /var/opt/
ln -s  /var/opt/kapacitor /var/opt/kapacitor-1.6.6-1

Updating the user's PATH variable to include kapacitor

This must be executed for each user who requires access to the application. By default, this is only required for the root user. Copy the following commands into the user shell

new_path="/var/opt/kapacitor/usr/bin/"

if [[ ":$PATH:" == *":$new_path:"* ]]; then
  echo "The new path is already in the PATH variable."
else
  echo "export PATH=\"$new_path:\$PATH\"" >> ~/.bashrc
  export PATH="$new_path:$PATH"
  echo "The PATH variable has been updated."
fi

Create default Kapacitor configuration

• Create a default configuration with the following command

kapacitord config > /var/opt/kapacitor/kapacitor.conf

• Adjust the configuration file as required with

vi /var/opt/kapacitor/kapacitor.conf

Create init.d start-up script

• create an init.d start/stop the script with

vi  /etc/init.d/kapacitord

• File content, adjust the required sections

#!/bin/bash
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          kapacitord
# Required-Start:    $remote_fs $network
# Required-Stop:     $remote_fs $network
# Default-Start:     5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# Short-Description: InfluxDB kapacitord service
# Description:       This is a init.d script to start and stop InfluxDB's kapacitord
# Update the section start()/stop()/status() as needed
### END INIT INFO

# Path to the service executable
SERVICE_PATH="/var/opt/kapacitor/usr/bin/kapacitord"
CONFIGURATION_FILE="/var/opt/kapacitor/kapacitor.conf"
SERVICE_NAME="kapacitord"

# Command to start the service
start() {
    if [ -f "$SERVICE_PATH" ]; then
        echo "Starting $SERVICE_NAME..."
        "$SERVICE_PATH" -config "$CONFIGURATION_FILE" > /dev/null 2>&1 &
    else
        echo "Service executable not found: $SERVICE_PATH"
    fi
}

# Command to stop the service
stop() {
    echo "Stopping $SERVICE_NAME..."
    pkill -f "$SERVICE_PATH"
}

# Command to check the status of the service
status() {
    if pgrep -f "$SERVICE_PATH" >/dev/null; then
        echo "$SERVICE_NAME* is running."
    else
        echo "$SERVICE_NAME is not running."
    fi
}

# Handle command-line arguments
case "$1" in
    start)
        start
        ;;
    stop)
        stop
        ;;
    restart)
        stop
        sleep 1
        start
        ;;
    status)
        status
        ;;
    *)
        echo "Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart|status}"
        exit 1
        ;;
esac

exit 0

• make file executable

chmod +x /etc/init.d/kapacitord

• Adding init.d start/stop/status script to system start-up

update-rc.d kapacitord defaults

Start kapacitord

• to start or stop the service use the following commands
• to start

/etc/init.d/kapacitord start

• to status

/etc/init.d/kapacitord status

• to stop

/etc/init.d/kapacitord stop