The Varnish Agent 2.1

Posted on 2013-01-31

We just released the Varnish Agent 2.1.

• Code and bug tracker: https://github.com/varnish/vagent2
• Demo (for now): http://84.209.194.23:6085/html/.
• Debian, Ubuntu and Red Hat/Centos packages: http://users.varnish-software.com/~kristian/agent/
• License: FreeBSD (Same as Varnish)
• Written by: Myself! For Varnish Software (http://www.varnish-software.com)

(Nice when you can start a blog post with some copy/paste!)

Two-ish weeks ago we released the first version of the new Varnish Agent, and now I have the pleasure of releasing a slightly more polished variant.

The work I've put in with it the last couple of weeks has gone towards increasing stability, resilience and fault tolerance. Some changes:

• Fixed several memory leaks
• Fixed JSON formatting that broke the log output
• Add privilege separation
• Handle varnishd restart much better
• Handle changing of the -T option without restarting the agent
• Log assert errors to syslog
• Add site specific javascript

For a complete-ish log, see the closed tickets for the 2.1 milestone on github.

This underlines what we seek to achieve with the agent: A rock stable operational service that just works.

If you've got any features you'd like to see in the agent, this is the time to bring them forth!

I've already started working on 2.2 which will include a much more powerful API for the varnishlog data (see docs/LOG-API.rst in the repo), and improved HTTP handling, including authentication.

So head over to the demo, play with it, if you break it, let me know! Try to install the packages and tell me about any part of the installation process that you feel is awkward or not quite right.