Palette Insight Architecture

Palette Insight Server

What is Palette Insight Server?

This component is responsible for receiving data from the agents on the Tableau Servers and storing that data in a format that is compatible with the database importing component.

How do I set up Palette Insight Server?

Prerequisites

• Operating system: CentOS/RHEL 6.5+
• The server is using Supervisord for daemonizitation.

Installation

From rpm.palette-software.com

Make sure there is a repository definition file pointing to Palette RPM Repository:

/etc/yum.repos.d/palette.repo

Contents:

  [palette-rpm]
  name=Palette RPM
  baseurl=https://rpm.palette-software.com/centos/dev
  enabled=1
  gpgcheck=0

Install palette-insight-server

yum install palette-insight-server

How can I test-drive Palette Insight Server?

Building locally

go get ./...
go build -v

Testing

go get -t ./...
go test ./... -v

API

Health check

The PING endpoint doesn't do anything else but answers to requests with a PONG message so that very basic health checks can be performed (like AWS monitoring)

Param	Value
url	/api/v1/ping
method	GET
headers	-
params	-
response	PONG

License check

License check is disabled and as such obsolete now. However it is left in the system for easier maintainability and for the possibility to add it back if someone needs that.

Param	Value
url	/api/v1/license
method	GET
headers	The license key in Authorization header in Token 1234 format
params	-
response	The license object: { Trial bool, ExpirationTime string, Id int64, Stage string, Owner string, Name string, Valid bool}

Agent auto-update

Palette Insight Agents are capable of updating themselves when a new version of their installer is added to the Palette Insight Server. This is managed through this endpoint

Param	Value
url	/api/v1/agent/version
method	GET
headers	-
params	-
response	404 if no agent was ever added to the server. 200 otherwise with version data: {Version: {Major int, Minor int, Patch int}, Product string, Md5 string, Url string }

Param	Value
url	/api/v1/agent/{download_url}
method	GET
headers	-
params	-
response	The installer file for the new Palette Insight Agent

Agent config change

Insight servers make it possible to change the Palette Insight Agent configurations. This is done by these endpoints.

Param	Value
url	/api/v1/config
method	GET
headers	-
params	hostname
response	The config.yml file on the server for the given host

Param	Value
url	/api/v1/config
method	PUT
headers	-
params	hostname, uplodfile
response	-

Agent commands

Insight servers can make Palette Insight Agent do tasks. These tasks can be START, STOP, PUT_CONFIG and GET_CONFIG. If there are multiple agents all of them receive the commands. It is not yet possible to have commands only for a given host.

Param	Value
url	/api/v1/command
method	GET
headers	-
params	-
response	The command object: {Ts: string, Cmd: string}

Param	Value
url	/api/v1/command
method	PUT
headers	-
params	The command object {Ts: string, Cmd: string}
response	-

Agent list

Param	Value
url	/api/v1/agents
method	GET
headers	-
params	-
response	The agent list in a map of hostname => lastContact format. ie: {host1: "2006-01-02T15:04:05Z07:00", host2: "2006-01-02T15:04:05Z07:00"}

File upload

The data gathered by the Palette Insight Agent is sent to the Palette Insight Server as csv files. Tableau log data (serverlogs) is further processed by Insight Server, some additional information is parsed and the timestamps are converted to UTC but other than that the Insight Server only stores the csv files on the filesystem and they will be imported by another component.

Param	Value
url	/upload
method	GET
headers	The license key in Authorization header in Token 1234 format
params	pkg, host (hostname of agent), tz (timezone of agent), compression (must be gzip)
response

Param	Value
url	/maxid
method	GET
headers	The license key in Authorization header in Token 1234 format
params
response

Configuration

The webservice uses the 'flag' library to handle configuration via both configuration files and environment variables.

For more information on the flag library see github.com/namsral/flag.

The environment variables and their corresponding configuration file values and command line flags are:

Type	Flag	Environment	File
string	-upload_path=/opt/insight-agent/uploads	UPLOAD_PATH=/opt/insight-agent/uploads	upload_path=/opt/insight-agent/uploads
string	-maxid_path=/opt/insight-agent/maxids	MAXID_PATH=/opt/insight-agent/maxids	maxid_path=/opt/insight-agent/maxids
string	-licenses_path=/opt/insight-agent/licenses	LICENSES_PATH=/opt/insight-agent/licenses	licenses_path=/opt/insight-agent/licenses
string	-updates_path=/opt/insight-agent/updates	UPDATES_PATH=/opt/insight-agent/updates	updates_path=/opt/insight-agent/updates
string	-config dev.config	CONFIG=dev.config	config=dev.config
int	-bind_port 8080	BIND_PORT=8080	bind_port=8080
string	-bind_address 127.0.0.1	BIND_ADDRESS=127.0.0.1	bind_address=127.0.0.1
bool	-tls	TLS=true	tls=true
string	-cert certs/cert.pem	CERT=certs/cert.pem	cert=certs/cert.pem
string	-key certs/key.pem	KEY=certs/key.pem	key=certs/key.pem
string	-logformat json	LOGFORMAT=text	logformat=color
string	-loglevel warn	LOGLEVEL=debug	loglevel=info

To get a list of command line options, use the --help switch. On my machine (windows) this results in:

./insight-server.exe --help
Usage of C:\Users\Miles\go\src\github.com\palette-software\insight-server\server\insight-server.exe:
  -archive_path="": The directory where the uploaded serverlogs are archived.
  -bind_address="": The address to bind to. Leave empty for default .
  -cert="cert.pem": The TLS certificate file to use when tls is set.
  -config="": Configuration file to use.
  -key="key.pem": The TLS certificate key file to use when tls is set.
  -licenses_path="C:\\Users\\Miles\\go\\src\\github.com\\palette-software\\insight-server\\server\\licenses": The directory the licenses are loaded from on start.
  -logformat="text": The log format to use ('json' or 'text' or 'color')
  -loglevel="info": The log level to use ('info', 'warn' or 'debug')
  -maxid_path="C:\\Users\\Miles\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\uploads\\maxid": The root directory for the maxid files to go into.
  -port=9000: The port the server is binding itself to
  -tls=false: Use TLS for serving through HTTPS.
  -updates_path="C:\\Users\\Miles\\go\\src\\github.com\\palette-software\\insight-server\\server\\updates": The directory where the update files for the agent are stored.
  -upload_path="C:\\Users\\Miles\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\uploads": The root directory for the uploads to go into.

Sample configuration file

A sample configuration file can be found in sample.config

# PATHS
# =====

# The root directory for the uploads to go into.
upload_path=/data/insight-server/uploads

# The path where the maxid files are stored
maxid_path=/data/insight-server/maxids

# The directory where the update files for the agent are stored.
updates_path=/data/insight-server/updates

# SERVER
# ======

# The address to bind to. Leave empty for default which is 0.0.0.0
bind_address=

# The port the server is binding itself to
port=9443

# SSL
# ===

# As we are using Nginx to forward the HTTPS requests to our port, we
# generally dont need to run with TLS

# Should the server use SSL?
#tls=true

# The locations of the SSL certificate and key files
#cert=/data/insight-server/ssl-certs/star_palette-software_net.crt
#key=/data/insight-server/ssl-certs/server.key

This configuration file gets installed as default when using the RPM installer.

IpTables

To allow the service to listen to port 443 without sudo privileges an IpTables forwarding needs to be set up.

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 443 -j REDIRECT --to-port 9443