Install the Scalyr Agent with cloud-init

Introduction

The cloud-init package (installed by default on a variety of modern distributions) can be used to automatically install and configure the Scalyr Agent. This is especially useful when working with ephemeral hosts. 

Configuration

I created the following cloud-init script to be executed from within an AWS EC2 launch template (although the embedded bash script could be used in a variety of other scenarios).

It installs the Scalyr Agent, sets up a configuration file with optimized defaults, and starts the Scalyr Agent:

MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="==MYBOUNDARY=="

--==MYBOUNDARY==
Content-Type: text/x-shellscript; charset="us-ascii"

#!/bin/bash
wget -q https://www.scalyr.com/scalyr-repo/stable/latest/install-scalyr-agent-2.sh && \
  sudo bash ./install-scalyr-agent-2.sh && \
  sudo tee /etc/scalyr-agent-2/agent.json > /dev/null << '_endmsg' && sudo scalyr-agent-2 start
 {
   api_key: "ABCXYZ-",
   compression_type: "deflate",
   compression_level: 6,
   max_allowed_request_size: 4900000,
   pipeline_threshold: 0.1,
   min_request_spacing_interval: 0.5,
   max_request_spacing_interval: 1.0,
   max_log_offset_size: 200000000,
   max_existing_log_offset_size: 200000000,
   implicit_metric_monitor: false,
   implicit_agent_process_metrics_monitor: false,
   logs: [
      { path: "/var/log/logfile", attributes: {parser: "myLogfile"} }
   ],
 }
_endmsg

--==MYBOUNDARY==--