Install and Uninstall Bindplane Collectors

Bindplane works in conjunction with the Bindplane Collector, which can be installed on Linux or Windows and supports the following distributions.

Supported Operating Systems

The Bindplane Collector runs on Linux, Windows, or macOS and supports the following distributions:

• AlmaLinux 8, 9

• CentOS 7, 8 Stream, 9 Stream

• Debian 10, 11, 12

• macOS 11.X and later

• Redhat Enterprise Linux 7, 8, 9

• Rocky Linux 7, 8, 9

• Scientific Linux 7

• SuSE Enterprise Linux 12 and 15

• Ubuntu LTS 18.04, 20.04, 22.04

• Windows 10, 11

• Windows Server 2012 R2, 2016, 2019, 2022

Note: 32-bit operating systems are not supported

Additionally, we will only provide support for the following if you are Bindplane Enterprise customer:

• CentOS 6

• Redhat Enterprise Linux 6

• Scientific Linux 6

• SuSE Enterprise Linux 11 SP4 (Earlier SP are not supported)

The following versions of Windows are unsupported, but can have Windows Events collected remotely:

• Windows 7

• Windows Server 2008

Other Operating Systems

Other operating systems, especially modern Linux variants using systemd, will likely work. These are still considered unsupported, as they have not been tested and vetted by Bindplane.

Installation Script

IMPORTANT

🚧 Install Collectors from Bindplane

To install the collector, you should get the installation script from Bindplane as outlined in Install Your First Collector. Doing so ensures the collector instantly connects to Bindplane and can be managed without additional configuration.

NOTE

📘 Agent or Collector: What's the difference?

We often use the terms Agent and Collector interchangeably. When you see either throughout the product or the documentation, we're always referring to the Bindplane Collector

Ansible

Ansible can be used as an alternative to the collector install script. The Bindplane Collector Ansible Role can be integrated into your Ansible playbooks to manage the installation of Bindplane-managed collectors.

Ansible is useful for installing collectors at scale, where the installation script would be cumbersome to manage on hundreds or thousands of systems.

Usage

The Bindplane Collector role must be cloned to your workstation and added to your playbook before it can be deployed.

Clone Repo

Clone the Ansible Role Git repository to your roles directory.

The following command will clone the repository to the directory roles/bindplane_agent.

git clone https://github.com/observIQ/bindplane-agent-ansible.git roles/bindplane_agent

Update Playbook

Update your Ansible Playbook to include the bindplane_agent role. The role requires the following parameters:

• version: Bindplane Collector version

• endpoint: The remote URL of the Bindplane server

• secret_key: The secret key of the Bindplane server. You can find the secret key on the install agent page, or with the CLI command bindplane secret get.

- name: my-playbook
  hosts: my-hosts
  become: yes
  roles:
    - role: bindplane_agent
      version: '1.39.1'
      endpoint: 'wss://app.bindplane.com/v1/opamp'
      secret_key: 'xxxx-xxxx-xxxxx-xxxx'

Deploy

Once the role is configured in your playbook, you can deploy the collectors to your host group. For example:

ansible-playbook playbook.yml -i ./site.yml

This command assumes you have a playbook file playbook.yml and a site file site.yml in your working directory, along with the roles/bindplane_agent directory.

Additional Documentation

A comprehensive list of configuration options can be found in the Bindplane Collector Role Github repository.

Uninstall The Bindplane Collector

On Linux, macOS, or Windows, run the following command to uninstall the collector.

Linux

sudo sh -c "$(curl -fsSlL https://github.com/observiq/bindplane-agent/releases/latest/download/install_unix.sh)" install_unix.sh -r

macOS

sudo sh -c "$(curl -fsSlL https://github.com/observiq/bindplane-agent/releases/latest/download/install_macos.sh)" install_macos.sh -r

Windows

(Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Product -Filter "Name = 'observIQ Distro for OpenTelemetry Collector'").Uninstall()

Optionally, on Windows, you can uninstall the collector via the control panel. Simply follow the steps below.

1. Navigate to the control panel, then to the "Uninstall a program" dialog.

2. Locate the observIQ OpenTelemetry Collector entry, and select uninstall.

3. Follow the wizard to complete the removal of the collector.

IMPORTANT

🚧 Data that persists after uninstalling

The collectors configuration files and log files are not removed when a collector is uninstalled. If you will not be re-installing the collector at a later time you may want to remove this folder. It will contain log files, the Bindplane configuration yaml, and any queue storage. Those files are located at "/opt/observiq-otel-collector" on Linux and "C:\Program Files\observIQ OpenTelemetry Collector" on Windows.