Selena Agent

Introduction

Selena is a tool for monitoring website performance by monitoring response times, response codes and site content (via keyword checks).

This is its agent part responsible for gathering the data and sending back the results.

Installation

Requirements

Selena agent requires Python 2.7 which is included in the latest Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS systems:

$ sudo apt-get install python-dev python-virtualenv

Dependencies:

$ sudo apt-get install libcurl3 libcurl4-openssl-dev

Message queue

Selena agent communicates with a central queue with Redis as the broker. Install redis:

$ sudo apt-get install redis-server

Since lost tasks can always be sent again, the durability guarantees which Redis provides by default are not necessary. You can significantly speed up the queue by commenting out the save lines from /etc/redis/redis.conf.

We can check the status of the Redis server:

$ redis-cli -h localhost -p 6379 -n 0 info

Virtual Environment

Create a virtual environment for Python in the user's home directory:

$ virtualenv . --distribute --no-site-packages

System User

Unprivileged and not owned by a person:

$ sudo adduser --home /home/selena-agent selena-agent
$ sudo su - selena-agent

In any shell the user can activate the virtual environment. As a result, the default Python executable and helper scripts will point to those within the virtualenv directory structure:

$ which python
/usr/local/bin/python
$ source bin/activate
(selena-agent)$ which python
/home/selena-agent/bin/python

Installing from pip

Simply invoke:

(selena-agent)$ pip install selena-agent

Installing from sources

Alternatively, to live on the bleeding edge, you can clone the selena-agent git repository to project and install it manually:

(selena-agent)$ git clone git://github.com/allegro/selena-agent.git project
(selena-agent)$ cd project
(selena-agent)$ pip install -e .

Configuration

Create file selena-agent/settings-local.py and fill in the appropriate data:

Fill Redis connection data:

REDIS_CONNECTION = {
    'HOST': 'your redis host',
    'PORT': 'your redis port',
    'DB': None,
    'PASSWORD': None,
}

RQ queue name:

QUEUE_NAME = 'your RQ queue name'

The salt has to match the one from the main Selena administration page:

SALT = 'taken from Selena system'

Run

To run selena-agent use the command:

(selena-agent)$ selena-agent

License

Selena is licensed under the Apache License, v2.0.

Copyright (c) 2013-2014 Allegro Group.