Chef Generic Webhook

Whether you have five or five thousand servers, Chef lets you manage them all by turning infrastructure into code. Infrastructure described as code is flexible, versionable, human-readable, and testable. This specific integration provides details on integrating with Chef Automate.

Pre-Requisites

• Chef Automate v 3.x or higher. The Generic Webhook is new functionality. See the following Chef documentation for instructions on how to configure the Notifier settings in the delivery.rb file of the Chef Automate server. delivery.rb Chef Help Docs
• Chef Automate Generic Webhook configured.
• xMatters account - If you don't have one, get one!
• xMatters ChefAutomateGenericWebhook Communication Plan (see zip file in above files) imported into xMatters or created in xMatters.

Files

• Chef-Generic-Webhook_IB.js - The javascript file to be pasted into a Inbound Integration Builder. It takes the payload from Chef and formats the content to match the xMatters Form requirements and creates an xMatters Event.
• ChefAutomateGenericWebhook.zip - The comm plan that has all the cool scripts and email format and such.

Installation

Chef Automate Server

1. Edit the delivery.rb file on the Chef Automate Server. See the following instructions to configure the Notifier Settings. delivery.rb.
2. The attached delivery.rb file is an example of the configured settings pointing to a xMatters instance. The following lines in the delivery.rb file are what send the information from Chef Automate to xMatters during an error.

       notifier['enable'] = true
       notifier['user_webhook_url'] = 'https://[xmatters instance]/api/integration/1/functions/[UUID]/triggers'    
   

The following is a sample notification message body:

  ``` 
  
  {
          "automate_fqdn":"automate.test",
          "failure_snippet":"Chef client run failure on [chef-server.test] centos-runner-1.test : https://failure_url \n Failure Reason\n",
         "exception_backtrace":"A long string with the backtrace that contains the error and \n",
         "exception_title":"Error Resolving Cookbooks for Run List:",
         "exception_message":"412 \"Precondition Failed\"",
         "automate_failure_url":"automate.test/long/url/that-takes-you-to-run-failure-page",
         "timestamp_utc":"2017-06-19T19:58:35.000000Z",
         "start_time_utc":"2017-06-19T19:58:35.000000Z",
         "end_time_utc":"2017-06-19T19:58:35.000000Z",
         "node_name":"centos-runner-1.test",
         "type":"node_failure"
    }
    
    ```

3. Restart the Chef Automate server after saving the delivery.rb file.

xMatters set up

1. Import the Communication Plan (see files). If this step is done you can skip steps 2.
2. Configure the xMatters Endpoints. Endpoints provide a simple way to define the base URL and authentication credentials to use when making HTTP requests from a transformation script. xMatters Endpoints
3. Create a chef group in xMatters and add your self to the group. Groups allow you to notify a set of users, devices, dynamic teams and other groups as a single recipient. Groups may be simple collections of members or they can employ complex shift schedules, escalation time lines, and rotations to allow you to notify only the members that are actively on duty. xMatters Groups. The name of the chef group can be changed in the Inbound IB script.

      var recipients = [];
      // Add a recipient targeting a user or group
      recipients.push({
            'targetName': 'chef'
      });

Testing

1. Run a Cookbook in Chef that will force the run to fail.
2. A message should come through on your devices. Which ever devices you have configured in xMatters.

Troubleshooting

View xMatters Activity Stream to determine issues with Chef payload or connectivity.