Pros and cons for Linux listening target and SSH target

Advice
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1

Hi Team,

I am trying to find out what are the pros and cons of Linux listening tentacle(agent) and SSH target(agent less).

Thanks,
Prabhjot

3

Good morning @prabhjotkour.91,

Thank you for contacting Octopus Support and great question on the pros and cons of Linux listening targets and SSH targets.

I imagine you have seen these already but just for context I have listed out documentation on both below:

Linux Listening and Polling Tentacles
Linux SSH Targets

As for the pros and cons, really which one you use comes down to personal preference and networking / machine requirements.

  • SSH targets do not have our tentacle software installed and only uses Calamari to execute tasks, this means an SSH target will use less space on the machine as it only has calamari placed into a folder and not a tentacle program and service installed. This also means an SSH target has less overheads on things such as RAM and CPU.

  • SSH targets also do not need to have tentacle updates, only calamari ones, which are done during a deployment so there are less administrative overheads with regards to having to update the tentacle on an SSH target (as there is no tentacle).

  • However, SSH targets are a lot more difficult to install and initially setup as you need to ensure you follow our documentation correctly and have all the relevant cyphers and pre-requisite software installed on the machine. You also need to make sure the server is accessible though SSH and SFTP which may be something your network audit requirements may not agree with. You also need to know how to setup an SSH keypair.

  • There are also different considerations to be made for calamari on mono.

  • SSH targets can also be a bit more difficult to troubleshoot on as you do not get a set of tentacle logs that are easy to view if you do have an issue.

Hopefully that helps, as long as your network and machine requirements allow you can use either target type, it just really depends on your personal preference and the administrative overheads you are willing to perform. Most users will use Listening and Polling tentacles as they are much easier to install and manage from a troubleshooting point of view but customers with small machine overheads will tend to use SSH targets.

Let me know if you have any other questions surrounding this as I would be happy to help answer them for you.

Kind Regards,
Clare