metal-toolbox / alloy

Server inventory, bios data collector

Alloy

Alloy collects and stores server hardware inventory and bios configuration data.

Hardware inventory includes information on the hardware components present on a server, the firmware versions installed and the component health status.

Inventory collection with Alloy can be executed in two modes,

• In band - the alloy command is executed on the target host OS.
• Out of band - the alloy command is executed on a remote system that can reach the target BMC.

Build

a. build linux executable make build-linux

b. build osx executable make build-osx

Run - outofband

Assets are fetched from a store, this is defined by the by the -store flag, the accepted -store flag parameters are csv, fleetdb, mock.

for see examples.

FleetDB store

graph TD
  a((Alloy))-- 1. read BMC creds -->ss[(FleetDB)]
  a((Alloy))-- 3. store/update data -->ss[(FleetDB)]
  a((Alloy))-- 2. collect data -->sa(ServerA BMC)
  a((Alloy))-- 2. collect data -->sb(ServerB BMC)

Loading

For this store, Alloy expects fleetdb credentials and configuration, this can be set through env vars, for an example see fleetdbapi.env

1. Collect data for asset in fleetdb inventory store, dump collected data to stdout.

alloy outofband --store fleetdb --asset-ids <FleetDB asset ID>  --output-stdout

2. Collect data for asset in fleetdb inventory store, update fleetdb with the collected information.

alloy outofband --store fleetdb --asset-ids <FleetDB asset ID>

CSV store

The CSV store is an sample inventory store implementation, that can be used to collect data on assets listed in the csv, without having to run fleetdb.

Note: this store is only supported for outofband commands.

alloy outofband --store csv --csv-file ./examples/assets.csv  --asset-ids 6b8a090c-39f0-4c45-89e1-041044d27402 --log-level trace --output-stdout

Run - inband

Inband inventory collection requires various OS based utilites provided by ironlib docker image.

graph TD
  a((Alloy))-- 1. Lookup asset -->ss[(FleetDB)]
  a((Alloy))-- 3. store/update data -->ss[(FleetDB)]
  a((Alloy))-- 2. collect through host OS utils -->s(Server host OS)

Loading

alloy inband --store fleetdb --asset-id <FleetDB server ID> --log-level trace

Metrics and traces

Go runtime and Alloy metrics are exposed on localhost:9090/metrics.

Telementry can be collected by setting env variables to point to the opentelemetry collector like Jaeger.

export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=jaeger:4317
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_INSECURE=true

Alloy commands

❯ ./alloy
server inventory and bios configuration collector

Usage:
  alloy [command]

Available Commands:
  completion  Generate the autocompletion script for the specified shell
  help        Help about any command
  inband      Collect inventory data, bios configuration data on the host
  outofband   Collect inventory data, bios configuration data through the BMC
  version     Print Alloy version along with dependency - ironlib, bmclib version information.

Flags:
      --config string      configuration file
      --enable-pprof       Enable profiling endpoint at: localhost:9091
  -h, --help               help for alloy
      --log-level string   set logging level - debug, trace (default "info")
      --output-stdout      Output collected data to STDOUT instead of the store
      --store string       The inventory store kind (fleetdb, csv) (default "mock")

Use "alloy [command] --help" for more information about a command.

Development

For Alloy internals and development, checkout the README-development.md