Extending SaltStack

Troubleshooting beacons

Beacons are a type of module that require both a running Master and a running Minion. Running the salt-master service in the foreground won't give you much insight, since the code will be running on the Minion, but running the salt-minion service in the foreground will be very helpful:

# salt-minion -l debug

Set aside a Minion that only has your beacon configured and no others. By default, these beacons will run every second, and that can generate very noisy logs indeed:

[INFO    ] Executing command 'machinectl --no-legend --no-pager list' in directory '/root'
[DEBUG   ] stdout: vsftpd container systemd-nspawn
[INFO    ] Executing command 'machinectl --no-legend --no-pager list' in directory '/root'
[DEBUG ] stdout: vsftpd container ...