This guide provides steps on using Ansible to install Apache SkyWalking on VM instances.

Prerequisites

• Ansible installed.
• A working knowledge of Ansible.
• Access to instances.

Instructions

Change diroectory

cd ansible

Test Connectivity to the Instances

Before installing SkyWalking, ensure that you can connect to the instances:

ansible -m ping all

Expected Output:

You should see output for each IP with a SUCCESS status:

<ip1> | SUCCESS => {
    "ansible_facts": {
        "discovered_interpreter_python": "/usr/bin/python3"
    },
    "changed": false,
    "ping": "pong"
}
<ip2> | SUCCESS => {
    "ansible_facts": {
        "discovered_interpreter_python": "/usr/bin/python3"
    },
    "changed": false,
    "ping": "pong"
}

Install Apache SkyWalking

After confirming connectivity, proceed to install Apache SkyWalking using the Ansible playbook:

ansible-playbook skywalking.yml

Configurations

The Ansible playbook can be customized to install Apache SkyWalking with different configurations. The following variables can be modified to suit your needs:

For full configurations, refer to the roles/skywalking/vars/main.yml. file.

# `skywalking_tarball` can be a remote URL or a local path, if it's a remote URL
# the remote file will be downloaded to the remote host and then extracted,
# if it's a local path, the local file will be copied to the remote host and
# then extracted.
skywalking_tarball: "https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/release/skywalking/9.5.0/apache-skywalking-apm-9.5.0.tar.gz"

# `skywalking_ui_environment` is a dictionary of environment variables that will
# be sourced when running the skywalking-ui service. All environment variables
# that are supported by SkyWalking webapp can be set here.
skywalking_ui_environment: {}

# `skywalking_oap_environment` is a dictionary of environment variables that will
# be sourced when running the skywalking-oap service. All environment variables
# that are supported by SkyWalking OAP can be set here.
skywalking_oap_environment: {}

You can create a local variable file to override the default values:

cat <<EOF > local.var.yaml
skywalking_tarball: "~/workspace/skywalking/apm-dist/target/apache-skywalking-apm-bin.tar.gz"
EOF

And then run the playbook with the local variable file:

ansible-playbook skywalking.yml -e @local.var.yaml

Accessing SkyWalking UI!

After the installation is complete, you can go back to the aws folder and get the ALB domain name address that can be used to access the SkyWalking UI:

cd ../aws
terraform output -raw alb_dns_name

And you can open your browser and access the SkyWalking UI with the address.