Installing Gremlin on Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF)

You can use Gremlin to test the reliability of your Cloud Foundry workloads using agent-based experiments. Gremlin supports infrastructure-level experiments via the Gremlin agent and application-level experiments via Failure Flags. This article walks through deploying the Gremlin agent so you can run infrastructure-level experiments.

You can deploy Gremlin to Cloud Foundry and similar BOSH-managed environments using the Gremlin BOSH release. This article walks through the following steps:

1. Gathering your credentials
2. Adding Gremlin to your BOSH deployment
3. Verifying your installation

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Prerequisites

Before deploying to Cloud Foundry, you’ll need:

1. The BOSH CLI (v2 or later)
2. A live BOSH Director

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Gather your credentials and store them in CredHub

All Gremlin integration installations require authentication with the Gremlin Control Plane. For PCF, you will need three things:

• Your Gremlin Team ID
• Your team's certificate
• Your team's private key

You can access these in the Team Settings page in the Gremlin web app. If you wish to use another method of authenticating, see the Authentication docs.

Once you have your credentials, run the following commands to safely store them inCredHub. Make sure to replace <bosh-env>, <YOUR_GREMLIN_TEAM_ID>, <YOUR_GREMLIN_CERTIFICATE>, and <YOUR_GREMLIN_PRIVATE_KEY> with their respective values. If you use a different secrets management solution, you can skip this step.

credhub set -n /BOSH_ENV/cf/gremlin_team_id \
  -t value \
  -v "YOUR_GREMLIN_TEAM_ID"

credhub set -n /BOSH_ENV/cf/gremlin_team_certificate \
  -t value \
  -v "YOUR_GREMLIN_CERTIFICATE"

credhub set -n /BOSH_ENV/cf/gremlin_team_private_key \
  -t value \
  -v "YOUR_GREMLIN_PRIVATE_KEY"

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Upload the Gremlin BOSH release to your environment

Next, upload the latest agent release to your environment. Please contact your Gremlin account manager for a link to the BOSH release.

With the release downloaded, run this command, replacing YOUR_ENV with your Cloud Foundry environment name:

bosh -e YOUR_ENV upload-release gremlin-VERSION.tgz

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Add the release to your deployment

Now that the bosh-release is available, you can add it to your Cloud Foundry deployment. First, add the release to an ops file or a runtime config, replacing my-instance-group with the name of the instance group(s) you want to deploy the agent to:

releases:
- name: gremlin
  version: ((release_version))

addons:
- name: gremlind-my-instance-group
  include: {instance_groups: [my-instance-group]}
  jobs:
  - name: gremlind
    release: gremlin
    properties:
      gremlin:
        team_id:          ((gremlin_team_id))
        team_certificate: ((gremlin_team_certificate))
        team_private_key: ((gremlin_team_private_key))

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To update the runtime config on the Director use the following bosh command (be sure to change runtime-config.yml to your manifest’s filename):

bosh -e YOUR_ENV update-runtime-config runtime-config.yml

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Once the runtime config is updated all deployments will be considered outdated. The Director will apply runtime config changes to each deployment during the next bosh deploy for that deployment.

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Verify your installation

To verify that your release is working, open the Agents page in the Gremlin web app. Your Cloud Foundry instance(s) will be listed using the name format [instance-group-name]-[instance UUID].