Gather Machine Stats | Tidal Migrations

Gather machine stats from remote environments

Overview

Getting an accurate view of your infrastructure needs is useful when planning a cloud migration. Most datacenter operations groups have a good view of their overall storage utilization from various SAN and virtualization management tools, but relying on these aggregated data points often causes teams to underestimate the storage needs of their applications in the cloud.

When taking an application-centric approach to cloud migration, getting the resource utilization from each individual server gives you a more accurate view of each application’s resource requirements in the cloud and ignores the trickery of thin-provisioning from SAN tools. This allows you to confidently plan data replication time, or other migration metrics on an app-by-app basis.

Tip: As your cloud migration will likely take place over many months or years, it’s important to have current resource requirements throughout your journey. To accomplish this, setup machine_stats in a cron job or Scheduled Task and synchronize your data on a daily basis to Tidal Migrations.

Windows

Introduction

This is a simple and effective way to gather machine stats (RAM, Storage, CPU) from a Windows Server environment. For better results, we recommend using it with WinRM to Invoke-Command across your servers. However, it is also possible to execute in non-WinRM environments, though not all of the stats will be available to gather in such case. As a result it outputs JSON data which can be securely sent to your Tidal Migrations workspace using the tidal command.

Requirements and Dependencies

Prior to the steps on syncing your hypervisors, be sure to have the below dependencies setup:

To get started you will need to have Tidal Tools installed. You can check out Getting Started with Tidal Tools guide on how to install it.
To gather additional data, such as CPU utilization and process stats, you will need WinRM enabled across your environment for this.
The scripts needed for this process can be found in Machine Stats for Windows GitHub repository.

Running the Script

Note: Be sure to set PowerShell’s Execution policy to execute this script before running it. This guide will help you in doing so.

To start, run the script .\save_password.ps1 and enter your password when prompted. This will save your credentials securely in a text file.
Save a list of the server hostnames that you would like to sync in a file. By default, Machine Stats script will search for file called servers.txt in the current folder. If a list was saved in some other file, you can specify its path using the -ServersPath parameter for runner.ps1 script.
Run the script .\runner.ps1. It will prompt for username. Alternatively, you can specify the username using the -UserName parameter. The data of the list of servers will be shown as a JSON.
You can pipe the output of the Machine Stats script directly to the Tidal Tools: .\runner.ps1 | tidal sync servers

Note: We recommend that you set this script to run periodically so that your servers are synced on a daily basis and the data is up to date. Here is an example of a scripting task in PowerShell that runs daily.

And there you have it! Your servers will be synced to Tidal Migrations.

Unix-like systems

Introduction

Machine Stats for Unix-like Systems leverages Ansible to gather facts in a cross-platform way.

Requirements and Dependencies

Prior to the steps on syncing your Unix/Linux machines, be sure to have the below dependencies setup:

To get started you will need to have Tidal Tools installed. You can check out Getting Started with Tidal Tools guide on how to install it.
You need to install Python 3.6+ on your local workstation (control node) and Python 2.6+ or Python 3.5+ on the machines you need to gather stats from (managed nodes). Please refer to the Machine Stats for Unix-like systems technical documentation for installation instructions.

Running the Script

Create a hosts file in the current directory.
Add connection strings in the form of ssh-user@ip-address or ssh-user@domain to the hosts file one per line If the ssh-user@ part is omitted, then the current user name is used.
If you need to use a custom SSH identity file for some particular host, provide it as the following:
```
 my-user@example.com ansible_ssh_private_key_file=path/to/key-file.pem
```
Execute machine-stats and pipe its output to Tidal Tools:
```
 $ machine-stats | tidal sync servers
```

For more details on configuration and usage, please check Machine Stats for Unix-like systems technical documentation.

Hypervisors (QEMU/KVM) new

Introduction

Machine Stat for Hypervisors is built ontop of libvirt and it gathers facts from virtual machines within a QEMU/KVM environment.

Requirements and Dependencies

To get started you will need to have Tidal Tools installed. You can check out Getting Started with Tidal Tools guide on how to install it.
You need to install Python 3.6+ on your local workstation.
You need to have libvirt 3.0+ on your local workstation and on a remote machine which hosts the QEMU/KVM environment.

Please refer to the Machine Stats for Hypervisors technical documentation for installation instructions.

Running the Script

Make up the connection URI to communicate with a remote environment.

Execute virt-stats and pipe its output to Tidal Tools:

virt-stats --connection qemu+ssh://myuser@myhost/system | tidal sync servers

For more details on configuration and usage, please check Machine Stats for Hypervisors technical documentation.