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Splunk universal forwarder for balena raspberryPi 4

This project illustrates a method for using a splunk universal forwarder to send logs from an app container in a Balena application on a Raspberry Pi 4 to a remote splunk indexer.

Major design concerns

  • Getting the arm forwarder to run on an rPi 4 isn't too difficult. See splunk/Dockerfile.template, where we run dpkg --add-architecture armhf && apt-get update && apt-get install -y libc6:armhf libstdc++6:armhf wget && ln -s /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/ld-2.30.so /lib/ld-linux.so.3
  • download.splunk.com is not hugely reliable when retrieving the ARM universal forwarder. See splunk/usr/local/bin/get-splunk.sh
  • Permissions on shared data volumes can be a little tricky.
    • Each container defines a COMMON_UID and COMMON_GID that we can use to manage file ownership across containers.
    • Pay attention to the apache Dockerfile.template. We have to set an appropriate umask for apache log files, set group ownership of the logs directory to COMMON_GID, and then, since apt starts apache2 at install time, remove the initial log files it creates. You'll have to adapt and adjust this process for whatever application you're running- just make sure that in the app container(s), log files and directories are readable by COMMON_UID or COMMMON_GID
  • The splunk forwarder configuration is set in the splunk/opt directory, and copied in to the splunk container wholesale.
    • Adjust the values in opt/splunk/etc/system/local/outputs.conf to your splunk installation.
    • In production, I use Splunk Cloud for index/search. You'd set this up the same way you would on any other forwarder: copy the contents of your splunk cloud UF config package to splunk/opt/splunk/etc/apps and things should Just Work(TM).
  • Have a look at splunk/usr/local/bin/entrypoint.sh. Balena (and docker) containers' hostname is typically meaningless; what we really care about is the name of the Balena device that logs are coming from. We use a quick sed expression to change the hostname in etc/system/local/inputs.conf to the value of ${BALENA_DEVICE_NAME_AT_INIT}, which is much more meaningful to humans. Adjust to your preference.
  • Be aware that your applications should rotate their log files, to avoid filling the shared log volume. SD cards have improved a lot, but also be aware that extensive writing and erasing will eventually cause an SD card to fail from fatigue.

Future work

This was a quick Friday afternoon hackathon project. The splunk container is fairly large at this point (~325 MB); slimming it down is likely to be quite a project- the splunk app itself is large- accounting for the bulk of the container size- and due to libc dependencies, porting to Alpine appears at first glance to be fraught with peril. PRs- for image size or any other consideration- are 100% welcome!