Infrastructure Tests as Monitoring Checks

Notes from an afternoon discussion at the 2017 Sensu Summit.

Certain infrastructure testing best practices are important in the context of reusing them as monitoring checks; e.g.:
- As a general best practice, functional tests are better than doing things like checking for the existence of files on disk
- Functional tests should do things like check if services are running and responding to requests
- Functional tests are even better if they are doing things like validating service responses
- The things you want to be true (via an infrastructure test) upon a successful configuration management run, are very similar to the things you want to monitor on an ongoing basis
Sean Porter gave a talk at PuppetConf 2016 demonstrating this workflow using ServerSpec tests with Puppet
- Video: https://youtu.be/AbRA-bqqOrg
- Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/portertech/watching-the-puppet-show
Paul Czarkowski (IBM) made mention of using Sensu for actual compliance testing using InSpec and Sensu
- Slides: http://tech.paulcz.net/sensu-at-bluebox-sensuconf-2017/#/
- Paul shared a link to their InSpec plugin in the Sensu Community Slack, here: https://github.com/blueboxgroup/ursula-monitoring/blob/master/sensu/plugins/check-inspec.rb
There is a Sensu Plugin for ServerSpec: https://github.com/sensu-plugins/sensu-plugins-serverspec
- In reviewing the plugin it looks like it may be RSpec under hood
- This plugin may "just work" with InSpec with some testing

calebhailey/sensu-summit-open-spaces-afternoon-session.md