Getting Started > Installing Gremlin on a virtual machine

Installing Gremlin on a virtual machine

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Before installing, review the list of caveats to see if additional steps are required for your environment.

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General steps for deploying the Gremlin Agent to a virtual machine:

Gather your credentials

All Gremlin integration installations require authentication with the Gremlin Control Plane. We recommend using the Client Configuration File method, as it contains everything needed to authenticate and configure the Gremlin Agent in one file. To create and download a client configuration file:

Access the Team Settings page in the Gremlin web app.
Click the Configuration tab.
On the Client Configuration File line, click Download to download the file. You'll receive a file named config.yaml.
Optionally, make any additional configurations to the config.yaml file.

If you wish to use another method of authenticating, see the Authentication docs.

Install Gremlin packages

Choose the format that corresponds to your distribution.

DEB packages (Ubuntu, Debian, etc.)
RPM packages (SUSE, Amazon Linux, RHEL, CentOS, Rocky, etc.)
Docker image

If you intend to run experiments against container workloads, it is recommended to install Gremlin as a container using the Docker image. If you choose to install Gremlin using an RPM or DEB package and target container workloads with experiments, some work may be necessary to grant the gremlin Linux user access to container socket files such as /run/containerd/containerd.sock . By default, Gremlin will add itself to the docker Linux group if it is present during installation.

DEB packages

For DEB-based Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian, and so on.

BASH


# Add packages needed to install and verify gremlin (already on many systems)
sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y apt-transport-https dirmngr

# Add the Gremlin repo
echo "deb https://deb.gremlin.com/ release non-free" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gremlin.list

# Import the GPG key
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 9CDB294B29A5B1E2E00C24C022E8EF3461A50EF6

# Install Gremlin
sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y gremlin gremlind

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Installing older versions

If you want to install an older version of Gremlin, you can list all Agent versions using apt list -a gremlin and install them using apt install gremlin-x.x.x-x

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RPM packages

SUSE-based distributions

For distributions based on SUSE Linux, such as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), openSUSE, etc.:

BASH


# Install dependencies
sudo zypper install -y iproute-tc libcap-progs

# Add the Gremlin repo
curl https://rpm.gremlin.com/gremlin.repo -o /tmp/gremlin.repo && sudo zypper addrepo /tmp/gremlin.repo

# Install Gremlin and dependencies
sudo zypper refresh && sudo zypper install gremlin gremlind

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Non SUSE-based distributions

For non SUSE-based RPM distributions such as Amazon Linux, RHEL, CentOS, etc.:

BASH


# Install dependencies
sudo yum install -y iproute-tc

# Add the Gremlin repo
sudo curl https://rpm.gremlin.com/gremlin.repo -o /etc/yum.repos.d/gremlin.repo

# Install Gremlin
sudo yum install -y gremlin gremlind

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If you're using RHEL 8, the following packages must be installed:iproute-tc kernel-modules-extra

BASH


sudo yum install -y iproute-tc kernel-modules-extra

If you're using RHEL 9, the following packages must be installed:
kernel-modules-extra

Fresh deployments of RHEL 9 may require a reboot for the necessary kernel module to be load, as the packages pulls in an updated kernel-core package.
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BASH


sudo yum install -y iproute-tc kernel-modules-extra

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Installing older versions

If you want to install an older version of Gremlin, you can list all Agent versions using yum list available gremlin --showduplicates and install them using yum install gremlin-x.x.x-x

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Docker image

Alternatively, instead of installing Gremlin directly on the host operating system, you can deploy Gremlin from the Docker image on DockerHub.

To run the daemon, use the following command. Replace $GREMLIN_TEAM_ID with your team ID and $GREMLIN_TEAM_SECRET with your team's secret key:

BASH


docker run -d \
    --net=host \
    --pid=host \
    --cap-add=SYS_PTRACE \
    --cap-add=SYS_ADMIN \
    --cap-add=SYS_CHROOT \
    --cap-add=SYS_RESOURCE \
    --cap-add=NET_ADMIN \
    --cap-add=SYS_BOOT \
    --cap-add=SYS_TIME \
    --cap-add=KILL \
    -v /var/lib/gremlin:/var/lib/gremlin \
    -v /var/log/gremlin:/var/log/gremlin \
    -v /sys/fs/cgroup:/sys/fs/cgroup \
    -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
    -e GREMLIN_TEAM_ID \
    -e GREMLIN_TEAM_SECRET \
    gremlin/gremlin daemon

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Configure Gremlin

The minimum configuration required to authenticate the Gremlin Agent is:

Team ID
Secret or certificate

If you downloaded a client configuration file, you already have everything needed to register the Agent. Just follow these instructions:

Copy the configuration file (named config.yaml) to the /etc/gremlin/ directory. The final path should be /etc/gremlin/config.yaml:
BASH
```
sudo cp config.yaml /etc/gremlin/config.yaml
```
Restart the gremlind service
BASH
```
sudo systemctl restart gremlind
```

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Additional configuration options

Read this section if you wish to further configure the Gremlin Agent. Otherwise, skip to the next section.

For Reliability Management, Gremlin uses tags such as operating system, zone, and local-hostname to identify each service's fingerprint. Gremlin automatically detects many tags, but if you wish to apply custom tags (e.g. environment, location, or service name), read the Network tags documentation.

For more information and additional configuration options, see Configuring Gremlin for more information.

Make any edits to the /etc/gremlin/config.yaml file, then restart the gremlind service after you've made your changes.

Customize Gremlin's Linux user and group

By default on Linux, Gremlin installs a gremlin Linux user and group, and sets the suid bit on /usr/bin/gremlin so that all users can run the Gremlin executable. These defaults can be overridden at installation time by supplying environment variables to the installer.

For example, to run Gremlin as root and restrict executable access to root:root, you would run:

SHELL


GREMLIN_INSTALL_USER=root GREMLIN_INSTALL_GROUP=root GREMLIN_INSTALL_BIN_MODE=0770 \
  sudo -E yum install gremlin gremlind

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The full list of variables available at install time, and their defaults are as follows:

Variable	Default	Description
GREMLIN_INSTALL_USER	`gremlin`	The Linux user to own all file installed by Gremlin. This user is created if it does not exist
GREMLIN_INSTALL_GROUP	`gremlin`	The Linux group to own all file installed by Gremlin. This group is created if it does not exist
GREMLIN_INSTALL_BIN_MODE	`0750`*	The file mode for executable files installed by Gremlin.
GREMLIN_INSTALL_BIN_CAPABILITIES	unset	A boolean argument specifying whether Gremlin's required capabilities should be set on the binaries themselves. The default is false. Any value supplied to this variable evaluates to true.

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* Gremlin versions before 2.33.0 default this value to 6111 instead.

Validate the installation

There are two ways to ensure your installation was successful and your Agents authenticated successfully:

Check the Gremlin web app

The easiest way to verify connectivity is to open the Agents list in the Gremlin web app. Check for your newly installed Agent by name or by tag. You can also use the search box to search by name or tag, Agent version, operating system (OS), or region. If your Agent does not appear in this list, it may not have been installed or configured correctly, or it might not be able to reach Gremlin's servers.

Check the Gremlin Agent

First, verify that the Gremlin Agent is running on the target system:

SHELL


sudo systemctl status gremlind

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This should return the following:

● gremlind.service - Gremlin Daemon
     Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/gremlind.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Wed 2023-01-04 10:44:12 EST; 5 days ago

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If the service is instead reporting as inactive or failed, try restarting the service using:

SHELL


sudo systemctl restart gremlind

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After verifying that the Gremlin Agent is running, use gremlin check auth to check the Gremlin Agent's authentication status:

SHELL


gremlin check auth

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If the Gremlin Agent authenticated successfully, the output will be similar to the following:

auth
====================================================
Auth Input Type                      : Certificate
API Response                         : OK

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If not, the output will explain why the Gremlin Agent was unable to authenticate:

auth
====================================================
Auth Input Type                      : No valid auth found
========= Identification ============:
Team ID Source                       : Team ID not found
Gremlin Identifier                   : [Host identifier]
Gremlin Identifier Source            : Not supplied explicitly, using the default
========= Secret/Token Info =========:
Team Secret Source                   : Team Secret not found
.credentials valid                   : /var/lib/gremlin/.credentials file not found
========= Certificate Info ==========:
Team Certificate Source              : Team Certificate not found
========= Private Key Info ==========:
Team Private Key Source              : Team Private Key not found

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Troubleshooting

If the Agent is connected but is reporting as unhealthy, see Troublehsooting Unhealthy State in the Gremlin Knowledge Base. If you're having trouble authenticating, see the Authentication FAQ in the Gremlin Knowledge Base for possible causes and solutions.

Uninstalling Gremlin from a virtual machine

The command for uninstalling the Gremlin agent from a Linux virtual machine will vary depending on your distribution.

Uninstalling DEB packages

For DEB-based Linux distributions such as Ubuntu and Debian:

BASH


sudo apt remove gremlin gremlind

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Uninstalling RPM packages

SUSE-based distributions

For distributions based on SUSE Linux, such as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), openSUSE, etc.:

BASH


sudo zypper remove gremlin gremlind

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Non SUSE-based distributions

For non SUSE-based RPM distributions such as Amazon Linux, RHEL, CentOS, etc.:

BASH


sudo yum remove gremlin gremlind

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Uninstalling Docker image

If you deployed Gremlin using Docker, use the following command to uninstall it. Note that the container name may be different than gremlin, depending on whether you specified a name:

BASH


sudo docker stop gremlin
sudo docker rm gremlin

Compatibility