SensuFlow GitHub Action

The GitHub Action for SensuFlow, a git-based approach to managing Sensu resources.

Introduction

This GitHub Action will allow you to manage Sensu resources for multiple Sensu namespaces as part of GitHub-facilitated CI/CD workflows.

In order to use this action, you'll first need to define a Sensu user and associated role-based access control. A reference RBAC policy and user definition matching the Action's default settings is provided below as a reference.

How It Works

This Action provides an opinionated best practises to using the sensuctl create and sensuctl prune commands in order to efficiently manage Sensu monitoring resources in one or more namespaces. The Action automates several resource linting actions to help ensure self-consistent monitoring resources are defined prior to updating any Sensu resources.

This is achieved by processing a directory structure where each subdirectory is mapped to a Sensu namespace. By default, the required directory structure looks like:

.sensu/
  cluster/
    namespaces.yml
  namespaces/
    <namespace>/
      checks/
      hooks/
      filters/
      handlers/
      handelersets/
      mutators/
  

where <namespace> is a placeholder for each Sensu namespace under management. The cluster/ directory can be used to optionally manage Sensu cluster-wide resources, such as namespaces, if the Sensu RBAC profile in use allows for cluster-wide resource management.

Setup

Configure the Sensu RBAC Profile

Below are instructions to create an RBAC profile that can be used with this Action with the default settings. This profile makes use of Sensu CluserRole and ClusterRoleBindings to grant the Action user access to a subset of Sensu resources cluster-wide. You may want to use a more restrictive RBAC policy to meet your security requirements.

You will need to run these commands in an environment where sensuctl is pre-configured to communicate with the Sensu backend you want SensuFlow to work with.

Create the sensu-flow ClusterRole

The Sensu ClusterRole defines the resource permissions the GitHub resource will need.

$ sensuctl cluster-role create sensu-flow \
  --resource namespaces,roles,rolebindings,assets,handlers,checks,hooks,filters,mutators,secrets \
  --verb get,list,create,update,delete

Create the sensu-flow ClusterRoleBinding

The Sensu ClusterRoleBinding connects the ClusterRole to a group of users.

$ sensuctl cluster-role-binding create sensu-flow \
  --cluster-role sensu-flow \
  --group sensu-flow

Create the sensu-flow User

A Sensu user and password is needed to authenticate with the Sensu API. Make sure the user is a member of the sensu-flow group.

Create the user interactively:

$ sensuctl user create --interactive
? Username: sensu-flow
? Password: *********
? Groups: sensu-flow
Created

or, create the user non-interactively:

$ sensuctl user create sensu-flow \
  --password REPLACEME \
  --groups sensu-flow

Configure the SensuFlow GitHub Action

In order to make use of this GitHub Action you will need to use it as part of a GitHub Action workflow YAML definition. GitHub Action workflow definitions are placed in .github/workflows/ in your repository and must exist in the default branch. Please see the GitHub Action documentation for specifics.

The action requires 2 configuration options to be defined:

sensu_api_url
sensu_api_key

All other configuration options are considered optional.

You will also want to consider using GitHub secrets for sensitive information used in the Action configuration. At a minimum, you will want to consider using GitHub secrets for the sensu_user and sensu_password.

Verifying Configuration

Below is a working example that will run the SensuFlow GitHub Action when pushing to main branch or when a main branch pull-request is created.

GitHub Action Workflow Example

Save as .github/workflows/sensu-flow.yaml and commit to main branch. After activating the workflow in the GitHub UX, this Action should run for any commits into main.

name: SensuFlow CI Example

on:
  push:
    branches: [ main ]
  pull_request:
    branches: [ main ]

jobs:
  # Defined the SensuFlow job 
  SensuFlow:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    # Step 1: Checks-out your repository, so your job can access it
    - name: Checkout
      uses: actions/checkout@v2

    # Step 2: use the versioned sensu/sensu-flow action 
    - name: Sensuflow with required settings
      uses: sensu/sensu-flow@0.7.0
      with:
        ##
        # Required configuration
        # Please make use of GitHub secrets for sensitive information 
        ##
        sensu_api_url: ${{ secrets.SENSU_API_URL }}
        sensu_api_key: ${{ secrets.SENSU_API_KEY }}
        ##
        # Optional configuration, if not present defaults will be used
        ##
        namespaces_dir: .sensu/namespaces
        namespaces_file: .sensu/cluster/namespaces.yaml
        matching_label: "sensu.io/workflow"
        matching_condition: "== 'sensu-flow'"
        ##
        # Only prune resources created_by these users, you'll want to make sure
        # this list includes the user associated with the api-key used for authorization
        ##
        resource_authors: "sensu-flow"

Your First SensuFlow Workflow

Now that the action is activated and configured to run on any push into the main branch, you can test it.

Create a Test Namespace

Edit the file .sensu/cluster/namespaces.yaml in your git repository and define a Sensu namespace resource for a new testing namespace.

---
type: Namespace
api_version: core/v2
spec:
  name: test-namespace

Create Corresponding Namespace Directory

mkdir -p .sensu/namespaces/test-namespace
touch .sensu/namespaces/.keep

The SensuFlow GitHub Action will process the test-namespace directory, using resource definitions found within as a source of truth for the state of the corresponding Sensu namespace. The .keep file just tells git to keep the directory structure as part of the repository even if there are no files defined in it.

Create Initial Resources in test-namespace

mkdir .sensu/namespaces/test-namespace/checks edit the file .sensu/namespaces/test-namespace/checks/hello_world.yaml

type: CheckConfig
api_version: core/v2
metadata:
  name: hello_world
  labels:
    sensu.io/workflow: sensu-flow
spec:
  command: echo "hello world"
  interval: 30
  publish: false
  subscriptions:
  - test
  timeout: 10

mkdir .sensu/namespaces/test-namespace/handlers edit the file .sensu/namespaces/test-namespace/handlers/test.yaml

type: Handler
api_version: core/v2
metadata:
  name: test
  labels:
    sensu.io/workflow: sensu-flow
spec:
  command: sleep 10
  type: pipe

Commit and Push Changes

Once these files are in place, you can commit and push the changes back to GitHub. The SensuFlow GitHub Action should trigger and run to completion. You can then verify using sensuctl in your administrative environment that the test-namespace exists.

sensuctl namespace list

and that the namespace contains the hello-world check and the test handler

sensuctl --namespace test-namespace check list
sensuctl --namespace test-namespace handler list

Delete the Check From the Git Repository

Now delete the hello_world.yaml file and commit the change again. The SensuFlow GitHub Action will use sensuctl prune to remove the check and you should be able to verify that the check no longer exists in the test-namespace.

GitHub Action Configuration Reference

Namespace Resource Management

This action uses a special directory structure, mapping subdirectory names to Sensu namespaces to process. By default the directory processed is .sensu/namespaces/ but this can be overridden in the Action configuration. If this directory exists, each subdirectory will be processed as a separate Sensu namespace. Example directory structure:

.sensu
└── namespaces
    └── test-namespace
        ├── checks
        │   ├── check-cpu.yaml
        │   ├── check-http.yaml
        │   ├── false.yaml
        │   └── true.yaml
        ├── filters
        │   └── fatigue-check.yaml
        ├── handlersets
        │   └── alert.yaml
        ├── handlers
        │   ├── aws-sns.yaml
        │   └── pushover.yaml
        └── mutators
            └── check-status.yaml

Using this example, this Action would process the test-namespace, pruning the namespace resources according to matching_label, matching_condition, and managed_resourcessettings

Optionally Preparing Namespaces

If the namespaces file (default: .sensu/cluster/namespaces.yaml) exists and is populated with Sensu namespace resource definitions, then this Action will be used to create the Sensu namespace resources defined in the file before attempting to process the namespaces directory.

Note: Namespaces are a cluster-level resource, so in order to use the namespaces creation capability the Sensu user will need cluser-level role-based access to create namespaces.

Configuration

Required settings

sensu_api_url

The Sensu API url, same as sensuctl uses ( ex: https://sensu.example.com:8080 )

Authentication settings

sensu_api_key

A Sensu API key OR

sensu_user (deprecated)

The Sensu user to auth

sensu_password (deprecated)

The Sensu user password

Optional settings

configure_args:

description: optional arguments to pass to sensuctl configure

sensu_ca_string:

description: Optional Custom CA pem string. Use this if you want to encode the CA pem as a github secret

sensu_ca_file:

description: Optional Custom CA file location, this will override sensu_ca_string if used

namespaces_dir:

description: Optional directory to process default: ".sensu/namespaces"

namespaces_file:

description: Optional YAML file containing Sensu namespace resources to create default ".sensu/cluster/namespaces.yml"

matching_label:

description: Optional Sensu label selector, default: "sensu.io/workflow"

matching_condition:

description: Optional Sensu label matching condition, default: "== 'sensu-flow'"

managed_resources:

description: Optional comma seperated list of managed resources, default: "checks,handlers,filters,mutators,assets,secrets/v1.Secret,roles,role-bindings,core/v2.HookConfig"

resource_authors:

description: Optional comma seperated list of resource authors to filter created_by metadata, default: "sensu-flow"

disable_tls_verify:

description: Optional boolean argument to to disable tls cert verification  default: false

disable_sanity_checks:

description: Optional boolean argument to to disable sanity checks  default: false    

Using the Docker container image with other CI/CD tools

While this is originally developed and tested for use with GitHub Actions, there is a vendor neutral sensu/sensu-flow Docker container image available as of version 0.6.0 that should be suitable for use with any CI/CD tool chain that is capable of using container images for CI/CD jobs. Here's a list of contributed instructions for alternative CI/CD vendors:

• Docker Image
• Bitbucket
• GitLab

Contributed instructions for additional CI/CD services are welcome.

Goals

SensuFlow is under active development, so please don't hesitate to submit issues for any enhancements you'd like to see.

The main improvements we're currently focused on at the time of this writing (H1'21) are as follows:

• Improved pre-flight tests (test Sensu endpoint liveness, verify authentication credentials, etc.)
• Improved linting (label enforcement, type validation, etc.)
• Validate integrity of assets (optionally fetch all configured assets, verify SHA512 values)
• Reference testing (if a check/handler refers to assets and/or secrets, are the asset/secret resource definitions also present?)

For more information, please view the SensuFlow project issues and milestones.