Pre-Installation Tasks

This section describes the configuration tasks you must complete before installing ALEC.

OpenNMS configuration

Set `$OPENNMS_HOME` variable

The ALEC installation instructions refer to the $OPENNMS_HOME environment variable, which must be set.

On RHEL or CentOS, use the following command: export OPENNMS_HOME=/opt/opennms.

On Ubuntu or Debian, use the following command: export OPENNMS_HOME=/usr/share/opennms.

Verify your OpenNMS installation

Run the health:check command in an OpenNMS Karaf shell to verify the status of your OpenNMS instance.

If the health check returns "Everything is awesome," continue to the next pre-installation task. An "Oh no, something is wrong" error message indicates a problem that you must address before moving forward.

The most common result you may see involves a missing Elasticsearch configuration, similar to the following:

admin@opennms> health-check
Verifying the health of the container

Verifying installed bundles                    [ Success  ]
Connecting to ElasticSearch ReST API (Flows)   [ Success ] => Not configured

=> Everything is awesome

OpenNMS deployments install the opennms-flows feature set by default, but may not point to the Elasticsearch server. To fix this issue, you can either uninstall the feature (using the feature:uninstall opennms-flows command), or point the feature to an Elasticsearch instance:

config:edit org.opennms.features.flows.persistence.elastic
config:property-set elasticUrl http://elastic:9200
config:update

Replace the sample URL (http://elastic:9200) with one that points to your Elasticsearch instance.

Run the health:check command again and, if the "Everything is awesome" message is displayed, continue to the next tasks.

Enable alarm history storage for Elasticsearch

We strongly recommend that, when using ALEC, you leverage the Elasticsearch integration. This integration lets OpenNMS maintain historical alarm information in Elasticsearch.

To set up the integration, run the following commands in an OpenNMS Karaf shell:

Point your OpenNMS instance to an Elasticsearch instance:

config:edit org.opennms.features.alarms.history.elastic
config:property-set elasticUrl http://elastic:9200
config:update

Replace the sample URL (http://elastic:9200) with one that points to your Elasticsearch instance.

Install the feature:

feature:install opennms-alarm-history-elastic

After the feature is installed, run the health:check command. If everything is configured properly, an "Everything is awesome" message is displayed.

Enable syslogd

We recommend that you enable syslogd to take advantage of the syslog patterns and event definitions that ALEC provides.

Edit $OPENNMS_HOME/etc/service-configuration.xml

and change the following:

<service enabled="false">
    <name>OpenNMS:Name=Syslogd</name>

to:

<service>
    <name>OpenNMS:Name=Syslogd</name>

This change will come into effect the next time OpenNMS restarts. Do not restart OpenNMS at this point; you will restart it as part of the ALEC installation procedure.

Set up package repositories

Packages for ALEC are available in the same Debian and YUM repositories as OpenNMS. If you already have the stable repository installed, you can skip this step.

Set up YUM repository (RHEL/CentOS)

For RHEL- or CentOS-based distributions, install the repository:

yum -y install https://yum.opennms.org/repofiles/opennms-repo-stable-rhel7.noarch.rpm
rpm --import https://yum.opennms.org/OPENNMS-GPG-KEY

Set up APT repository (Ubuntu/Debian)

For Ubuntu- or Debian-based distributions, install the repository:

cat << EOF | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/opennms.list
deb https://debian.opennms.org stable main
deb-src https://debian.opennms.org stable main
EOF
wget -O - https://debian.opennms.org/OPENNMS-GPG-KEY | apt-key add -
apt update