Configuring the beacon agent v23.40.0

TPA installs and configures the beacon agent on nodes which have the role beacon-agent in config.yml. If --enable-beacon-agent is passed to tpaexec configure, then all of the postgres nodes in the cluster have this role.

Beacon agent package version

By default, TPA installs the latest available version of beacon-agent.

The version of the beacon-agent package that is installed can be specified by including beacon_agent_package_version: xxx under the cluster_vars section of the config.yml file.

cluster_vars:
    …
    beacon_agent_package_version: '1.56.2-1'
    …

You may use any version specifier that apt or yum would accept.

If your version does not match, try appending a * wildcard. This is often necessary when the package version has an epoch qualifier like 2:....

Beacon agent configuration

The beacon agent configuration contains two parameters which must be set per-cluster, the access key and the project id.

The access key is kept encrypted in the cluster directory and can be set or read using tpa's store-password and show-password commands:

$ tpaexec store-password . beacon_agent_access_key
Password:

$ tpaexec show-password . beacon_agent_access_key

If the environment variable BEACON_AGENT_ACCESS_KEY is set when tpaexec provision is run, the access key is set from its value.

The project id is stored in config.yml under the beacon_agent_project_id key in cluster_vars. If the --beacon_agent_project_id argument is passed to tpaexec configure then its value is written to config.yml appropriately.

Installing the beacon agent

TPA installs the beacon agent from EDB's repositories and creates an operating system user called beacon and a database user called beacon. A configuration file for the agent is written to .beacon/beacon_agent.yaml in the beacon user's home directory.

Running the beacon agent

TPA installs a systemd service unit file to start the agent at boot-time, running as the beacon user.