Installing the IBM Netcool Operations Insight Event Integrations Operator

The following tasks represent the typical task flow for performing your IBM® Netcool® Operations Insight® Event Integrations Operator installation:

1. Install Netcool Operations Insight

2. Configure Storage

3. Add the operator catalog and prepare your cluster

4. Install IBM Netcool Operations Insight Event Integrations Operator

5. Attach entitlement key

6. Create your integration instance

1. Install Netcool Operations Insight

The IBM Netcool Operations Insight Event Integrations Operator requires IBM Tivoli® Netcool/OMNIbus ObjectServer to be created and running on Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform (OCP). A current version of IBM Netcool Operations Insight is required to create IBM Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus ObjectServer on OCP. Refer to the IBM Netcool Operations Insight documentation: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/noi

2. Configure Storage

You must define storage classes in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and set your storage configuration to satisfy your sizing requirements.

Gateways uses persistent volume to store persistent data such as the cache file for Store-and-Forward functionality that allows the gateway process to resume data processing from the last data fetched and forward it to the Object Server.

Probes that support persistent custom rules files and JSON parser configuration use a persistent volume for users to provide a custom rules file with a JSON parser configuration file that is mounted to the probe pods for event processing. The persistent volume is not required by default and only required if users enable the persistent rules files when configuring the probe.

Table 1. Integration types and access modes required
Integration type	Access modes required
Gateway for JDBC Integration	ReadWriteMany (RWX) or ReadOnlyMany (ROX)
Gateway for Kafka Integration	ReadWriteOnce (RWO)
Gateway for Pulsar Integration	Not applicable. Store-and-Forward is not supported.
Probe for Pulsar Integration	ReadWriteMany (RWX)
Probe for Kafka Integration	ReadWriteMany (RWX)
Probe for Webhook Integration	ReadWriteMany (RWX)
Probe for Prometheus Integration	Not applicable.

Each integration supports the following provisioning modes:

Dynamic provisioning

For storage providers that support dynamic provisioning, you can specify the storage class name in the probe or gateway custom resource to request persistent volume from the storage class specified or let the default storage class to provision a volume for your pods.
Static provisioning

For static provisioning, you can also specify labels to bind to specific storage volume.

The probes and gateways has been verified with Rook Ceph® storage provider.

3. Add the operator catalog and prepare your cluster

To install an operator, you must first install the catalog source into OCP and then install the operator.

You can get the IBM Netcool Operations Insight Event Integrations Operator from one of the following catalogs:

IBM Operator catalog
IBM Netcool Operations Insight Event Integrations Operator catalog

Installing the IBM Operator catalog into OCP

Log in to your Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform cluster.
Click Home > API Explorer, then search for CatalogSource.
Click Create CatalogSource.
In the CatalogSource name field, enter ibm-operator-catalog.
In the Publisher name field, enter IBM.
In the Image (URL of container image) field, enter icr.io/cpopen/ibm-operator-catalog:latest.
Under Availability, select the Cluster-wide CatalogSource option.

Installing the IBM Netcool Operations Insight Event Integrations Operator catalog into OCP

Log in to your Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform cluster.
Click Home > API Explorer, then search for CatalogSource.
Click Create CatalogSource.
In the CatalogSource name field, enter ibm-netcool-integrations-operator-catalog.
Provide a catalog source name and the image URL:
```
icr.io/cpopen/ibm-netcool-integrations-operator-catalog:latest
```
If a specific version is required, change the image tag with the specific version or use the image digest.

Attention: The dot character (.) is not allowed in the catalog source name.

Select the Create button.
The catalog source appears, after a few minutes refresh the screen to see the number of operators count become 1.

CLI enablement

The catalog can be added by applying the following YAML file to the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform cluster. Create this file and name it catalog_source.yaml.

apiVersion: operators.coreos.com/v1alpha1
kind: CatalogSource
metadata:
  name: ibm-netcool-integrations-operator-catalog
  namespace: openshift-marketplace
spec:
 displayName: IBM Netcool Operations Insight Event Integrations Catalog
 publisher: IBM
 sourceType: grpc
 image: icr.io/cpopen/ibm-netcool-integrations-operator-catalog:latest
 updateStrategy:
    registryPoll:
       interval: 45m

Apply the YAML file by using the command:

oc apply -f catalog_source.yaml -n openshift-marketplace

Verify the CLI installation

oc get CatalogSources ibm-netcool-integrations-operator-catalog -n openshift-marketplace

You receive this output on success:

NAME                                        DISPLAY                                     TYPE   PUBLISHER   AGE
ibm-netcool-integrations-operator-catalog   IBM Netcool Integrations Operator Catalog   grpc   IBM         38s

You receive this output on error:

Error from server (NotFound): catalogsources.operators.coreos.com "ibm-netcool-integrations-operator-catalog" not found

4. Install IBM Netcool Operations Insight Event Integrations Operator

You can install your operator by using the OpenShift console, the OpenShift CLI, or by using the OpenShift CLI natively.

Option 1: Install the operator using the OpenShift console

To install the IBM Netcool Operations Insight Event Integrations Operator using the OpenShift console, use the following steps:

Log in to your OpenShift cluster's console.
Click Operators > OperatorHub. The OperatorHub page is displayed.
In the All Items field, enter the IBM Netcool Operations Insight Event Integrations Operator. The operator is displayed.
Click the IBM Netcool Operations Insight Event Integrations Operator tile.
Click Install. The Install Operator page is displayed.
Enter the following values:
- Set Update Channel to the latest version available
- Set the Installation mode to A specific namespace on the cluster.
- Set the Namespace to the project (namespace) value that you want to install the operator into.
  
  Note: When using the console to install the operator, you can either use an existing namespace, the default namespace that is provided by the operator, or create a new namespace. If you want to create a new namespace, you can create it from this form. If you want to create a namespace before installing, from the Project list, select Create Project, specify the Name of the project that you want to create, and click Create.
- Set Approval Strategy to Automatic.
Click Install and wait for the your operator to install.

OpenShift informs you that the installation is complete. You can verify that installation by navigating to Operators > Installed Operators, and selecting your project from the Projects dropdown. The operator that you have just installed and all of its dependent operators in the project are listed with a status of Succeeded.

Option 2: Install the operator using the OpenShift CLI

Determine whether you want to create a new, or reuse an existing namespace to install your operator into. To create a new namespace in the CLI, run the following command:
```
oc create namespace <namespace>
```
Where <namespace> is the name of the namespace that you want to create.
Create Operator Group.

You must create an operator group in your custom project (namespace), or your operator will not install. There might be an operator group for managing a namespace for given APIs. If there is an Operator group for the namespace, do not create a second one.

Create the Operator group by running the following command:
```
cat << EOF | oc apply -f -
apiVersion: operators.coreos.com/v1
kind: OperatorGroup
metadata:
  name: ibm-netcool-integrations-operator-catalog-group
  namespace: <namespace>
spec:
  targetNamespaces:
    - <namespace>
EOF
```

Install your operator with the following command:

cat << EOF | oc apply -f -
apiVersion: operators.coreos.com/v1alpha1
kind: Subscription
metadata:
  name: ibm-netcool-integrations-operator-group-subscription
  namespace: <namespace>
spec:
  channel: <latest-version-of-the-operator>
  installPlanApproval: Automatic
  name: ibm-netcool-integrations-operator-catalog-group
  source: ibm-netcool-integrations-operator-catalog
  sourceNamespace: openshift-marketplace
EOF

Note: Change the source attribute to follow the name of the catalog source installed in previous step. For example: ibm-operator-catalog or ibm-netcool-integrations-operator-catalog.

After a few minutes, the operator is installed. Run the following command to verify that all of the components are in the Succeeded state:
```
oc get csv -n <namespace> | grep netcool-integrations-operator
```
Where <namespace> is openshift-operators if you are using the AllNamespaces installation mode, or the project (namespace) if you are using the OwnNamespace installation mode.

5. Attach entitlement key

Check your entitlement and get an entitlement key from the My IBM Container Library website: https://myibm.ibm.com/products-services/containerlibrary. You need to store the entitlement key on your cluster by creating an Image Pull Secret. Using a Kubernetes secret allows you to securely store the entitlement key on your cluster and assign it to the operator and the operand deployments to pull images from entitled registry.

Run the following command to create the secret and add it to your OpenShift namespace:


kubectl create secret docker-registry ibm-entitlement-key --docker-server=cp.icr.io --docker-username=cp --docker-password=<KEY> --docker-email=<EMAIL> --namespace <NAMESPACE>

Where:

<KEY> is your entitlement key.

<EMAIL> is your email address.

<NAMESPACE> is the name of your target OpenShift Container Platform namespace where the operator will be deployed.

The name of the secret that you are creating is ibm-entitlement-key with cp as the username and cp.icr.io as the registry server. The secret name is used by the operator to deploy the offering in later steps. If you change the name of any of secrets that you create, you need to change the corresponding name in later steps.

6. Create your integration instance

This section describes how to configure a probe or gateway instance either using the Openshift Console:

Log in to the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform web console with your Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform cluster admin credentials.
Change Project to the namespace where you installed the operator in. Select the namespace from the Project drop-down list.
In the navigation panel, click Operators > Installed Operators.
In the list on the Installed Operators panel, find and click IBM Netcool Operations Insight Event Integrations Operator.
Click the tile or tab corresponding to the probe or gateway that you want to create and click Create instance.
The instance creation panel opens, and offers two methods for configuring the resource; the Form view and the YAML view. Select the YAML view.
Change the spec.license.accept to true if you accept the license agreement.
Configure the probe or gateway instance parameters. See Connecting with IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps.
Click Create. The creation process can take a longer amount of time depending on your environment.

Your instance of Cloud Pak is added to the list of instances in the current project (namespace).