ScoutApp offers nice monitoring, even on CoreOS. Thanks, ScoutApp, for some great tools and service!

But we want to use environment variables instead of a yaml file to configure it more easily with our orchestration tools.

You will probably want to keep an eye on the official container on Docker Hub and its GitHub repository.

Scout is server monitoring for the modern dev team: automatic monitoring of key metrics, 80+ plugins to monitor your apps, real-time (every second) streaming dashboards, and flexibile alerting.

Deploying with SystemD

Make a SystemD unit file, /etc/systemd/system/scout.service:

[Unit]
Description=scout-agent
After=docker.service
Requires=docker.service

[Service]
TimeoutStartSec=0
EnvironmentFile=/etc/environment
EnvironmentFile=/etc/custom_environment
ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker kill scout-agent
ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker rm scout-agent
ExecStart=/usr/bin/docker run --name scout-agent \
    --net=host --privileged \
    -v /proc:/host/proc:ro \
    -v /etc/mtab:/host/etc/mtab:ro \
    -v /var/run/docker.sock:/host/var/run/docker.sock:ro \
    -e SCOUT_KEY=${SCOUT_KEY} \
    -e SCOUT_ENVIRONMENT=${SCOUT_ENVIRONMENT} \
    kindrid/docker-scout:latest

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then, you'll need to inject your scout environment and key. There are several ways.

You can hard code your info into the unit by replacing the interpolations (${SCOUT_KEY} and ${SCOUT_ENVIRONMENT}) with your desired values.

Or you can pass it in via a text file of environment variables. In this example unit we create such a file in /etc/custom_environment.

SCOUT_KEY=<REDACTED>
SCOUT_ENVIRONMENT=production

Your cloud provider may also provide ways to inject metadata into an instance. We do something like this using etcd, in the fleet example below.

Finally, start the service:

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl start scout
docker ps

2. Deploy it with SystemD

Run the scout image, mounting the scoutd.yml file. Running the image will first download the image, if it is not already locally available. Run the following command in the directory containing your scoutd.yml file:

docker run -d --name scout-agent \
	-v /proc:/host/proc:ro \
	-v /etc/mtab:/host/etc/mtab:ro \
	-v /var/run/docker.sock:/host/var/run/docker.sock:ro \
	-v `pwd`/scoutd.yml:/etc/scout/scoutd.yml \
	--restart=always \
	--net=host --privileged scoutapp/docker-scout

3. Or FleetD