Set up Ops Agent for Bare Metal Solution

The Ops Agent collects logs and metrics on your Bare Metal Solution server. It sends your logs to Cloud Logging and your metrics to Cloud Monitoring. To learn more about Ops Agent, see Ops Agent overview.

If you already have an existing OS-level monitoring solution, ensure that you can share data with us in event of an incident where you need our support. If you don't have any such solution or anything else, we recommend that you use Ops Agent.

Before you begin

  • Ensure that your Bare Metal Solution server is running a supported OS. The following OSes are supported for Ops Agent:

    • RHEL 7.x
    • RHEL 8.x
    • SLES 12.x
    • SLES 15.x

  • Ensure that you have the Service Account Credentials on your Bare Metal Solution server that authorize communication with Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring. If you don't have the required credentials, you must authorize the Ops Agent before installing it.

  • Enable the services for both the Cloud Logging API and Cloud Monitoring API.

Authorize the Ops Agent

Before installing the Ops Agent, you must ensure that it has the permission to send information to Google Cloud. This permission is given by using Service Account Credentials that must be stored on your Bare Metal Solution server. These credentials serve as Application Default Credentials (ADC) for the Ops Agent.

Authorization refers to the process of determining what permissions an authenticated client has for a set of resources. Google Cloud authorizes the Ops Agent on a Bare Metal Solution server by using ADC.

The Ops Agent supports ADC that authenticate using a private key from a service account. The key authorizes the key pair on a service account in a project, which lets you create an access token. The token is then used to provide an identity so that you can interact with Google Cloud APIs on behalf of the service account.

Authorizing the agent involves the following steps:

  1. Create a service account.
  2. Authorize the service account with a private key.
  3. Authorize the Ops Agent.

If you already have the required credentials, you can skip this process and install the Ops Agent.

Create a service account and key

This section describes how to create a new service account and grant it the necessary roles, and how to update an existing service account if it doesn't have the necessary roles.

To create a service account, complete the creating a service account procedures with the following information:

  1. Select the same Google Cloud project that contains your Bare Metal Solution server to create the service account.
  2. In the Role drop-down menu, select the following roles:
    • Monitoring > Monitoring Metric Writer.
    • Logging > Logs Writer.
  3. Select JSON as the Key type.

  4. Click Create.

    When you click Create, a file that contains a service account key is downloaded to your local system. For more information, see Create and delete service account keys.

Next, authorize the Ops Agent by using a service account private key.

Authorize a service account with a private key

To authorize the Ops Agent by using a service account private key, do the following:

  1. Copy the private key file to the following location on your Bare Metal Solution server so that the Ops Agent can recognize the credentials.

    /etc/google/auth/application_default_credentials.json

  2. Create an environment variable to point to the credentials file on your workstation. The following example creates a variable called CREDS:

    CREDS="~/Downloads/PROJECT-NAME-KEY-ID.json"

  3. Transfer the service account key to your Bare Metal Solution server.

    On your local system, use the scp command-line tool.

    1. Go to the Servers page.

      Go to Servers

    2. Identify the following information for your server:

      • Project ID
      • Server name
      • Location of the server

    3. On your Bare Metal Solution server, run the following commands:

      GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS="/etc/google/auth/application_default_credentials.json"
sudo mkdir -p /etc/google/auth
sudo mv "$HOME/temp.json" "$GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS"
sudo chown root:root "$GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS"
sudo chmod 0400 "$GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS"

      The variable GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS must be visible to the Ops Agent process. If your credential file is not in the previously listed default location, then in addition to the commands in the preceding examples, ensure that GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS is defined and visible to the Ops Agent process.

Authorize the Ops Agent

  1. Edit the /etc/systemd/system.conf file to add the following information. Create the file if it doesn't exist.

    DefaultEnvironment=GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS=path_to_credentials_file BMS_PROJECT_ID=PROJECT_ID BMS_LOCATION=REGION BMS_INSTANCE_ID=SERVER_ID

  2. Reload the environment variables.

    sudo systemctl daemon-reload

    Your Bare Metal Solution server now has the credentials that the Ops Agent needs.

  3. On your Bare Metal Solution server, restart the Ops Agent to use the new credentials by running the following command:

    sudo service google-cloud-ops-agent restart

Install the Ops Agent

To install the agent using the command line, do the following:

  1. Open a terminal connection to your Bare Metal Solution server using SSH or a similar tool and ensure that you have sudo access.

  2. Change to a directory for which you have write access. For example, your home directory.

  3. Download and run the Ops Agent installation script by running the following commands:

    curl -sSO https://dl.google.com/cloudagents/add-google-cloud-ops-agent-repo.sh

    sudo REPO_SUFFIX=bms bash add-google-cloud-ops-agent-repo.sh --also-install

After the installation is complete, the Ops Agent is started automatically.

What's next