Installing Beacon Agent

The following steps walk you through how to install and configure Beacon Agent, test it locally, and then run the agent to see the results in your Estates page in the EDB Postgres® AI Console.

Before you begin, you need to have the following:

• The access key for a machine user with the estate ingester role assigned to it. For more information, see Creating a machine user.
• The project ID for the project you want to monitor. You can find this in the URL when you are in the project in the EDB Postgres AI Console.

Enable your system to download packages

You need to enable the system you are planning on running the agent on to download packages from the EDB repositories for EDB Postgres AI.

Locate your EDB subscription token on the the EnterpriseDB repos download page.

Using the retrieved subscription token, set an environmental variables (EDB_SUBSCRIPTION_TOKEN) to the token's value. Also set an environmental variable for your EDB subscription type (EDB_SUBSCRIPTION_TYPE) to one of standard or enterprise depending on which plan you are signed up to:

export EDB_SUBSCRIPTION_TOKEN=<your-repos-token>
export EDB_SUBSCRIPTION_TYPE=<your-subscription-type>

Depending on your operating system, run the following command to enable your system to enable package downloading from the EDB repositories:

For RHEL-like or SLES:

curl -1sSLf "https://downloads.enterprisedb.com/$EDB_SUBSCRIPTION_TOKEN/$EDB_SUBSCRIPTION_TYPE/setup.rpm.sh" | sudo -E bash

For Debian or Ubuntu:

curl -1sSLf "https://downloads.enterprisedb.com/$EDB_SUBSCRIPTION_TOKEN/$EDB_SUBSCRIPTION_TYPE/setup.deb.sh" | sudo -E bash

Install the beacon-agent package

You can now install packages from EDB's repositories. Install the beacon-agent package:

For RHEL-like:

dnf install beacon-agent

Or if dnf isn't available:

yum install beacon-agent

For SLES:

zypper install beacon-agent

For Debian or Ubuntu:

apt install beacon-agent

Configure Beacon Agent

Create a Beacon configuration directory in your home directory:

mkdir ${HOME}/.beacon

Next, configure Beacon Agent by setting the access key (the one you obtained while Creating a machine user) and project ID:

export BEACON_AGENT_ACCESS_KEY=<your-access-key>
export BEACON_AGENT_PROJECT_ID=<your-project-id>

These environment variables are used when you run the beacon-agent setup command to create a configuration file in the Beacon configuration directory.

You also need to specify the Beacon configuration directory for storing the configuration file and the name of the configuration file to generate there. The $HOME/.beacon/ file is one of the default locations which beacon_agent searches for beacon_agent.yaml when it starts. Using the -file flag tells the agent setup process to create its configuration file in a specific location.

beacon-agent setup -file="$HOME/.beacon/beacon_agent.yaml"

During the beacon-agent setup process, an authentication attempt occurs, using the access key and project ID you provided. This authentication is necessary for Beacon Agent to communicate with the Beacon server and to register with the project.

Upon a successful registration, you should see a message indicating that you have authenticated successfully to your EDB Postgres AI project.

Configure database connections

Create DSN/connection strings for each database you want to monitor. These should include the database name, the user, the password, the host, and the port. For example:

"user=postgres password=postgres dbname=postgres host=localhost port=5432"

You can also use a DSN in the format postgres://user:password@host:port/dbname.

As DSNs can contain sensitive information such as the password, its best practice to create an environmental variable for each database you want to monitor and set each to the a corresponding DSN.

export DSN1=<dsn1>

Edit your $HOME/.beacon/beacon_agent.yaml configuration file and add an entry for each database you want to connect to, including the environmental variable for each database's DSN. Precede the DSN with a $ to indicate that it's an environmental variable. Each database entry should also include tags to help you identify the database in the EDB Postgres AI Console.

Entries under databases utilize the following format:

databases:
    <database_name_1>:
        dsn: "$DSN1"
        tags:
            - "<tag-one>"
            - "<tag-two>"
    <database_name_2>:
        dsn: "$DSN2"
        tags: 
            - "<tag-one>"
            - "<tag-two>"

Here is an example beacon_agent.yaml file configured for a database named sales_reporting:

agent:
  access_key: "$BEACON_AGENT_ACCESS_KEY"
  access_key_grpc_header: "x-access-key"
  batch:
    size: 100
  beacon_server: "beacon.biganimal.com:443"
  feature_flag_interval: 10m0s
  project_id: "<project ID>"
  providers:
    - "onprem"
provider:
  onprem:
    databases: 
      sales_reporting:
        dsn: "$DSN"
        tags:
            - "sales"
            - "reports"
    host:
      resource_id: "postgresql.lan"
      tags: []
    poll_interval: 5m0s

Test Beacon Agent locally

For an initial test of the agent, you can get it to send the data that it would normally send to the EDB Enterprise AI control plane to standard output, your terminal session, instead. This allows you to quickly confirm if the agent is successfully able to gather data and what that data looks like.

You can run the agent in standard output mode by modifying the beacon_agent.yaml file generated previously to have an "agent.beacon_server" value of "stdout". A truncated example of this would be:

agent:
    beacon_server: "stdout"

Next, run the agent in this mode using the following command:

beacon-agent

You should see output similar to the following eventually (it can take around 5 minutes to see the last few lines):

{"level":"debug","data":"$BEACON_AGENT_ACCESS_KEY","time":"2024-05-08T18:40:34Z","message":"expanding environment variable in configuration"}
{"level":"info","path":"/healthz","time":1715193634,"msg":"serving liveness probe"}
{"level":"info","path":"/readyz","time":1715193634,"msg":"serving readiness probe"}
{"level":"info","version":"v1.51.0-snapshot8986075626.97.1.166215e","time":1715193634,"msg":"starting beacon agent"}
{"level":"info","spiffe_enabled":false,"time":1715193634,"msg":"configuring tls"}
{"level":"info","server":"stdout","time":1715193634,"msg":"connecting to beacon service"}
{"level":"info","address":":8081","time":1715193634,"msg":"starting probe server"}
{"level":"info","target":"stdout","time":1715193634,"msg":"connected to beacon server"}
{"level":"info","time":1715193634,"msg":"verifying connection to beacon server"}
{"level":"info","project":"echo","time":1715193634,"msg":"verified connection to beacon server"}
{"level":"info","interval":"10m0s","time":1715193634,"msg":"loading feature flags periodically"}
{"level":"info","time":1715193634,"msg":"fetching feature flags"}
{"level":"info","feature_flags":{"echo_flag":"test","second_flag":false},"time":1715193634,"msg":"loaded feature flags"}
{"level":"info","id":"onprem","time":1715193634,"msg":"starting provider"}
{"level":"info","disable_partitioning":false,"batch_size":100,"interval":"10s","time":1715193634,"msg":"starting batch exporter"}
{"level":"info","provider_id":"onprem","time":1715193634,"msg":"registering ingestion worker in pool"}
{"level":"info","provider":"onprem","time":1715193634,"msg":"starting provider worker"}
{"level":"info","ingestions":[{"version":"v0.1.0","type":"onprem/host","id":"ip-10-0-128-121","metadata":{"Data":{"OnPremHostMetadata":{"hostname":"ip-10-0-128-121","operating_system":"linux","platform":"ubuntu","platform_family":"debian","platform_version":"22.04","cpu_limit":1}}}}],"time":1715193934,"msg":"sending ingestions via log client (not actually sending)"}
{"level":"info","successful_ingestions":1,"failed_ingestions":0,"time":1715193934,"msg":"exported ingestions"}

Configure Beacon Agent to send data

The next step is to configure Beacon agent to send data to the EDB Postgres AI control plane.

In the beacon_agent.yaml file, on the agent.beacon_server line, replace "stdout" with "beacon.biganimal.com:443":

agent:
    beacon_server: "beacon.biganimal.com:443"

Run Beacon Agent

Run the agent using the following command:

beacon-agent

The agent will start sending data to the EDB Postgres AI control plane. Follow the logs to monitor the data ingestion process.

Check the EDB Postgres AI Console to see the data from the agent.

After a few minutes, you should see the data from the agent in the EDB Postgres AI Console. Navigate to the Estates page's to see the data from the agent.