Welcome to BindPlane OP

This guide will walk you through installing BindPlane OP on Linux, adding an Agent, and configuring a Destination.

Step 1: Installing and Configuring BindPlane OP

Installation

An installation script is available to simplify installation. To see further installation options, check out our Installation page.

BindPlane OP Open Source

curl -fsSlL https://github.com/observiq/bindplane-op/releases/latest/download/install-linux.sh | bash -s --

BindPlane OP Enterprise

If you have an enterprise license, install with the --enterprise flag.

curl -fsSlL https://github.com/observiq/bindplane-op/releases/latest/download/install-linux.sh | bash -s -- --enterprise

Configuration

Initialize Server

First step is to initialize the server. For Linux, the default command for this is:

sudo /usr/local/bin/bindplane init server --config /etc/bindplane/config.yaml

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Get the bindplane init command from the installer

The Server Initialization section of the installer will have the exact bindplane init command for your system.

This does the following to parameters in the config.yaml located by default at /etc/bindplane/config.yaml.

• Set host to the instance's IP address, or 0.0.0.0 to bind to all IP addresses.
• Set username to your desired username
• Set password to your desired password
• Set serverURL to the HTTP endpoint of the server.
• Set remoteURL to the web socket endpoint of the server
• Add secretKey to a new randomly generated UUID. This is automatically generated by the init command.

Restart Server

Use the following command to restart the BindPlane server.

sudo systemctl restart bindplane

Viewing BindPlane Logs

Web server access logs can be viewed with:

sudo journalctl -f --unit bindplane

All other BindPlane logs are written to /var/log/bindplane/bindplane.log. This log file is rotated and compressed by the BindPlane process.

Using CLI

The BindPlane CLI can be used from the BindPlane Server. For an example command, run:

sudo bindplane --config /etc/bindplane/config.yaml help

For a detailed list of commands and a guide to installing the CLI on remote clients, see our CLI page.

Step 2: Access BindPlane UI

The BindPlane UI can be accessed with your browser on port 3001. The URL will be http://<IP Address>:3001 with IP Address being the IP of the BindPlane server. To log in, use the credentials you specified when running the init command.

In the UI, you'll find the Agents, Configs, and Destinations tabs. Next, you'll setup an agent.

Step 3: Install an Agent

Installation

Click the Install Agents button. Choose the operating system for the intended agent host, and copy the command generated. Run this command on your agent host system.
BindPlane installs the observIQ Distro for OpenTelemetry Collector, to learn more checkout the GitHub page.

Upon successfully installing the agent, it will appear back on the Agents tab with a "Connected" status.

Step 4: Configuration

To setup a configuration for the agent, navigate to the Configs tab and click New Configuration.

You'll now be in the configuration wizard. First is to name your config (see naming rules below). Then choose a platform for it to run on that corresponds to your agent(s). You can optionally add a description for the config, then click Next.

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Note: Rules for naming configs.

• must be 63 characters or less
• must begin and end with an alphanumeric character ( [a-z0-9A-Z] )
• can contain dashes ( - ), underscores ( _ ), dots ( . ), and alphanumerics between

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You can use existing OpenTelemetry config.yaml files.

If you already have an OpenTelemetry config.yaml, you can click the link to the raw configuration wizard. Add a name, choose a platform, and optionally add a description, then click Next. You can then either upload or copy and paste your config.yaml into BindPlane.

You can also import existing configs after the agent is added from the agent page.

Add a Source

Now you can add sources to your config. For this example, we'll just be using the Host source to collect host metrics. Add the source and set the parameters.

For the Host source, there are many metrics enabled by default and optional metrics that can also be enabled.

Click Save when you're done with the source configuration. You can add more sources, click on existing ones to see their configuration and edit or remove them, or click Next to move on to adding a destination.

Add a Destination

Last step is to add a destination. In this example, we'll use Google Cloud. Select the destination and configure the required settings.

For Google Cloud, enter a name (corresponding with the same naming rules listed above), fill in your project ID, then select the authentication method. If the VM running your BindPlane agent is already in Google Cloud, then you can leave the authentication method to auto. Otherwise, copy the contents of a credential json and paste it into the configuration wizard, or create a credentials file and place it on the host system, then fill in the file path in the configuration wizard.

When you're finished with the destination configuration, click Save. You can click on the destination to see the configuration and edit or remove it, or click Save to move on to finish the configuration.

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Creating a credentials file for Google Cloud

A Google Cloud Service Account can used for authentication by creating a service account and key.

Create a service account with the following roles:

• Metrics: roles/monitoring.metricWriter
• Logs: roles/logging.logWriter
• Traces: roles/cloudtrace.agent

Create a service account json key and place it on the system that is running the collector.

Apply Configuration

The next page is the Details page for the config you just created. At the bottom of the page in the Agents section, click the + icon to add an agent. Select which agents you'd like to apply the config to, then click Apply. Just like that, the config is now running on the agent!

Next Steps

Congratulations! You've successfully setup and configured BindPlane. Next, check out our available integrations at our Sources page and Destinations page.