Contrail Insights Installation for Standalone

To install Contrail Insights in a standalone environment:

1. Download the Contrail Insights files from Juniper Software Downloads and copy the following files onto the host where Ansible will be run.

   If you are installing a version earlier than 3.2.6, copy the Contrail Insights license file to the Contrail Insights Platform node.

2. Run the following commands to install Ansible on the installer node. Ansible will install Docker and docker-py on the appformix_controller. This allows Ansible to run between the installer node and appformix_controller node.

   Note:

   For RHEL, the following IPtables rule is needed to access port 9000:

3. Install Python and python-pip on the appformix_controller so that Ansible can run between the installer node and appformix_controller node.

4. Install the python-pip package on the hosts where Contrail Insights Agents run.

5. To enable passwordless login to the Contrail Insights Platform by Ansible, create an SSH public key on the node where Ansible playbooks are run and then copy the key to appformix_controller.

   Alternately, you can use ansible_connection=local as shown in the following inventory example:

6. Create an Ansible inventory by creating a directory named inventory and in that directory edit the inventory/hosts file. The following is an example:

   The host listed under group appformix_controller is mandatory. This is the host onto which Contrail Insights Platform will be installed. Optionally, you can monitor additional hosts by listing them in the bare_host section. All the hosts listed under appformix_network_agents are used as collectors to collect network device telemetry. Workload is distributed evenly between hosts listed under appformix_network_agents. As you add more network devices to Contrail Insights, you might need to add more hosts to do the telemetry collecting, which can be done by adding hosts to appformix_network_agents aggregate from the UI after installation.

7. In the inventory directory, create a subdirectory named inventory/group_vars and then create a file inventory/groups_vars/all inside this subdirectory:

   Add the following configuration parameters to the all file:

   If you are installing a version earlier than 3.2.6, include the path to the Contrail Insights license file in group_vars/all:

   Note:

   appformix_docker_images is mandatory. Also, be sure to add all required Contrail Insights SNMP, JTI Native, and gRPC network device monitoring plug-ins to the groups_vars/all file under variable appformix_plugins. There are more than 20 built-in plug-ins available in the certified_plugins/ directory. The example above shows how you can enable all built-in network device plug-ins.

   There are two ways to add network devices. One method should be chosen to add devices for monitoring.

   • Configure Network Device from JSON File

   • Configure Network Devices from the UI

8. Unpack the Contrail Insights TAR file and change to the created directory:

   Note:

   The remaining steps should be executed from within the contrail-insights-<version>/ directory. Although the product name changed from "AppFormix" to "Contrail Insights," the UI and internal command paths continue to show AppFormix and will reflect the new name at a later date.

9. Run Ansible using the path to the inventory directory created in Step 6 and Step 7. For example:

10. If running the playbooks as root user, you can skip this step. As a non-root user, for example “ubuntu” then user “ubuntu” needs access to the docker user group. Run the following command to add the user to the docker group:

11. To locate the Contrail Insights token for Auth Service, look in the following file on the Contrail Insights Platform host.

Contrail Insights can be easily upgraded by running the appformix_standalone.yml playbook of the new release. Follow the same procedure as for the installation.

If you want to uninstall Contrail Insights and destroy all data, execute the following command: