Wiki for Chef analytics: an Add-on available for chef

• Provides real-time visiblity into the chef server
• runs on seperate hardware than the chef server
• provides the logging feature to the chef server for better visibility into the server and troubleshooting
• Gather and consolidate the data from clients and severs

Actions can occur in different forms like:

• Knife commands
• Management console
• Chef clients
• workstations

All these actions are tracked by the chef analytics and are actionable in form of GUI

• Important as it can be used to predict future failures and actions that can cause a catastrophy.
• The actions in Chef Analytics may be exported as a JSON document or a CSV file.

• Chef analytics pushes communication to the Chef Server
• It does not require any other virtual machine or any seperate cloud server
• Uses the publish-subsribe messaging platform
• All the actions are achived into a database and can be customized on how it can be stored.
• All the actions in your organization can be viewed

• Time and Date when a specific user uploaded a cookbook from their workstation to the Chef server
• Time and Date at which a cookbook stopped working or had issues
• Traces of the changes that were made before any issues or when chef stopped working
• Which systems had the latest patch installed?

• The WebUI that is available for the dashboard makes data visualization much easier
• All the action data is searchable via web visualization tools and queries can be saved
• How the data is stored is highly customizable
• The data can be presented in different form using any of the tools
• Action log GUI can be used to perform other actions on top of present actions
• Actions can also be viewed at each object level
• Notifications can be sent out depending on the actions logged to other devops tools
• Allows data mining on the logs for deep analytics for future purposes

• Implementation of Chef is comparatively complex and Chef Analytics can cause additional overhead and complexity to the architecture

• Adding chef-analytics required rabbitmq changes

• attributes breaks chef-server

• chef-cookbooks/chef-server#119

• chef-boneyard/chef-analytics#12 issues fixed.