Multiple tools and disparate workflows challenge administrators to maintain and manage IT devices in large, complex environments. Orchestration is required to handle such scenarios. Orchestration brings people, tools and workflows together and simplifies IT processes.
Progress Chef Courier User Interface (UI) streamlines the customer experience by providing an intuitive interface for managing and executing jobs on the managed nodes. The UI also provides administrative access to users with permissions and license control.
Chef Courier UI gives you complete control and flexibility over how customers can perform actions on the fleet. IT operators, InfoSec engineers and other administrators can run on-demand jobs. More importantly, it reduces the burden of your team by removing the need to build custom solutions for emergency tasks and having prerequisite knowledge of the command line interface.
On the other hand, the Chef 360 platform is an integrated service that, besides hosting Chef Courier, provides DevSecOps, fleet management, job management and other supporting services in one UI.
Please read this document for more information on downloading and installing Chef 360 and node management.
Get Started on Chef Courier
How to Access Chef 360 UI
To gain access to the Chef 360 UI, you should:
- Navigate to
https://<CHEF_360_FQDN>:31000/app/hub
- Log in with username and password.
- Select your organization and role on the welcome page and select Proceed.
Five Important Functionalities of Chef 360 Platform UI
- Organization Management
- Node Management
- Chef Courier
- Download Centre
- Tenant Management
1. Organization Management
- User Management: Under the Organization Management user interface, you can add, invite and remove users. This section also allows you to perform all administrative tasks.
- Role Management: The role management page shows all the existing roles (Role name, type, status and actions) added by the users. You can even create/turn off a new role for existing users.
License to execute a Courier Job:
- Login as ‘tenant-admin’ under your profile
- Click on License Management and select either Load License or Upload License.
- Enter a valid license ID and submit. Once submitted, double-check the status of the enabled license.
Note: If you are trying Chef Courier for the first time and want to try it with the Trial or Free tier, please fill out the form.
Update Roles and Permission:
- Login as Org-admin’ under your profile.
- Click on Organization Management and the user you want to add permissions to.
- Click on Update Role and select all the relevant options.
2. Node Management
With node management, you can enroll nodes, make them visible in the fleet, manage the different skills installed on them and group nodes using filters and lists.
Under node management, you have settings that can help you out with:
- Skill Definitions: A skill is an agent that allows you to perform actions on a node for a specific outcome.
- Skill Assemblies: A skill assembly defines a set of skills to be installed or removed from a set of nodes.
- Override Settings: The Overside Settings page lists existing nodes and skills.
- Node Cohorts: A node cohort defines the skills and settings installed on every node in the cohort. The Node Cohorts page lists existing node cohorts.
- Enroll Nodes: Node enrollment brings nodes under the management of Chef 360 Platform.
How to Enroll Nodes
Node enrollment brings nodes under the management of the Chef 360 platform.
- To enroll a node, log in as node-manager and click on Node Management.
- Click on Node Management from the global menu and then select Enrollment. Based on the requirements, select either Single Node or Bulk Node enrollment.
- Provide IP address and Node Cohort along with required credentials and click on Enroll Node.
- Verify all the necessary skills are installed on the node.
- Once enrolled, you can see the node details in the All-Node View section.
- You can also create a Node filter for all the enrolled nodes. This filter can be used when creating a job instead of hardcoding the values in JSON format.
3. Chef Courier
You can use the Courier User Interface (UI) to view and create Courier jobs within the Chef 360 Platform UI.
You can see all jobs in the Courier Jobs page. The All-Jobs table looks like this:
- Courier Job Name: The name of the Courier Job.
- Job ID: A unique Job ID. For example:
ds91d188-g4cc-9051-6501-aj2499ac899i. - Job Created On: The date the job was created.
- Status: Whether the job is active or inactive.
- Last Job Instance: The date when the job was last run.
- Last Job Instance Status: The result of the previous job run (whether it was a Success or Failure).
- Job Schedule: Schedule of the job.
- All Node Distribution Group: A View button that shows the Node Collection, Batch size, Batch Type, Timeout and Success Criteria.
How to Create a Courier Job:
- Log in as a courier-operator under your profile to create and run a Courier job.
- Use the node filter or manually add nodes to create your first Courier job.
- Provide a valid Action Name, skill set and other conditions per the scenario; click Next.
- Provide a unique Job Name along with a description and review the details. Once confirmed, click on Save Job.
- Once you save the job, the job status will be active with the relevant Job ID.
- Get a more granular view of each node by clicking on the Courier job and job instance.
4. Download Centre
The Download Centre provides scripts that you can run to install various Chef Command Line Interfaces (CLIs).
- Chef Platform Auth CLI
- Chef Node Management CLI
- Chef Courier CLI
Select the relevant CLI. Then, select the relevant tab for your Operating System (OS). Finally, select Copy to copy the script.
5. Tenant Management
Tenant Management helps you organize, oversee and maintain the user lists along with their licenses and permission to manage and execute Courier jobs.
With Tenant Management, you can:
- Create a new organization unit
o Update/disable an organization unit
- User Management
o Edit User permissions
o Disable/Delete a user
- License Management
o Load License
o Sync License
o Upload License
o Disable/Delete a license
This blog introduces how to get started with our new orchestration platform. To learn more about the setup and features of the Chef Courier user interface, please visit docs.chef.io.
If you want to try Chef Courier, don't hesitate to contact your account team or fill out this form.