Announcing Azure Log Analytics Relay for Chef Automate

As system administrators, we all hope our fleet has 24×7 uptime without any problems. Of course, we live in the real world and this isn’t always the case. So when the inevitable occurs, it is vital to quickly receive an alert to the problem so it can be quickly identified and fixed. The new notification feature of Chef Automate gives you an easy way to inform monitoring and analytics systems on events such as Chef Client run failures and Compliance failures.

Chef Automate Notifications

In order to allow you to easily consume these notifications in Microsoft Azure, we are excited to announce availability of our Azure Log Analytics Relay for Chef Automate – this integration allows all notifications from Chef Automate to be sent to Azure Log Analytics (a component of Azure’s Insights & Analytics platform).

Custom Notification

The solution uses Azure Log Analytics to perform advanced searches, promote operational awareness and allow notifications to be redelivered to systems supported by Log Analytics through the built-in notifications system.

A notifications relay, built on top of Azure Functions is used to integrate Chef Automate with the Log Analytics API and is deployed as part of the solution.

Solution Deployment

The solution is currently provided as an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template that gives you the option to deploy a workspace for Log Analytics. In the future, we plan to make this an official Azure Quickstart Template available from the Azure Portal. For now, see the README at https://github.com/chef-partners/log-analytics-relay for all the technical details to get you started.

Prerequisites

To enable this solution in Azure, you must have an instance of Chef Automate v1.6.99 or higher already running that can access public IP networking in Azure. This can be either your own installation running in Azure, on-premises, or one created from the Azure Marketplace.

A list of current stable builds for an on-premises deployment can be found at: https://www.chef.io/downloads

More About Chef and Azure

Chef offers the best solution for Azure developers and IT professionals from app migration all the way into infrastructure management across hybrid clouds.

By making Chef Automate available on Azure Marketplace across Azure, US Gov Cloud and Azure Stack we provide customers the ease of 1-click deploy across their Azure environment. Tight integration with Visual Studio Team Services enables application teams to reduce security and compliance risks and leverage modern app architectures around containers. By using alerts and notifications from Chef into Azure Log Analytics IT professionals can get a single view of system health across their entire estate.

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Stuart Preston

Principal Engineer, Community Engineering at @Chef and Microsoft Azure MVP based in the UK. Reach me on Twitter @stuartpreston