Longview - The Arch Way

The Longview client is open source and can be installed on any Linux distribution–including systems not hosted by Linode. However, Linode only offers technical support for CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu.

When setting up a new client in the Longview area of the Linode Manager, we are presented with a curl command similar to the one below.

curl -s https://lv.linode.com/12345ABC-DCEE-1A23-5CF493X0X7XYZ | sudo bash

This created quite a bit of havoc on my Arch based Linode. Finally getting hung after attempting to install Perl modules.

Luckily there is another option, and that's installing via the unofficial AUR repository. This requires an installing an AUR helper if you haven't already. You can read more about that in the Arch Wiki

There are a few to choose from, I personally use Pakku. Check out Pakku on GitHub.

Once you have an AUR helper installed you can install the Longview by using the following command. If needed replace Pakku with the AUR helper of your choice. If you want to check out the package first see Longview in AUR

To install Longview use this command.

$ pakku -S longview

Next we copy the correct API key from the Longview Manager

Then paste the Longview API key into /etc/linode/longview.key

$ su

nano /etc/linode/longview.key

Once this file is saved we start the Longview process.

systemctl start longview

We can also set it to start automatically on boot.

systemctl enable longview

After a few minutes data should start flowing into the Longview dashboard.