Configure How the MongoDB Agent Manages Config Files and Passwords
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New in version 4.2.
To meet advanced auditing or compliance needs, you may need to do one or both of the following actions:
Store the
mongodormongos(collectively, the MongoDB process) configuration in memory to avoid writing passwords to disk.Remove MongoDB Agent passwords from the MongoDB Agent configuration file and read the passwords passed in the shell command.
Store MongoDB Process Configuration Files in Memory
MongoDB configuration files may contain credentials such as:
By default, the MongoDB Agent writes MongoDB process configuration files
to disk. However, you can store the configuration files in memory
by setting enableLocalConfigurationServer to true
in your
MongoDB Agent configuration file.
Changing this setting results in the following actions:
The MongoDB Agent caches your MongoDB process configuration in memory.
The MongoDB configuration file on disk contains only a
directivethat points to the full configuration file.
When the MongoDB Agent uses an in-memory MongoDB configuration, the MongoDB
process requests the full configuration file from its local
MongoDB Agent. The Agent requests the configuration file using the URL
in the __rest expansion directive.
Warning
If you use Ops Manager version 4.2 or versions 4.4.0 - 4.4.6, you may encounter
errors when setting enableLocalConfigurationServer to true.
To avoid this, see Store Configuration Files in Memory for Existing Clusters.
Considerations
Impacts Availability of MongoDB Deployments
When this feature is enabled, the MongoDB Agent doesn't store the MongoDB process configuration on disk. If the Ops Manager app server is unavailable and the MongoDB Agent attempts to restart, then the MongoDB Agent stops running because it doesn't have the necessary configuration information. If a MongoDB process crashes while the MongoDB Agent isn't running, then the MongoDB Agent can't restart the process.
Limits Importing Existing MongoDB Deployments
You can't import MongoDB processes that store configuration files in memory. When the MongoDB Agent stores its configuration in memory, MongoDB redacts any credentials after it starts. Therefore, MongoDB can't retrieve the credentials needed to import the process.
Private Key Format
If the encrypted private key for the .pem certificate file
is in PKCS #8 format,
it must use PBES2 encryption operations.
The MongoDB Agent does not support PKCS #8 with other encryption
operations.
Remove Passwords from the MongoDB Agent Configuration File
You can set the MongoDB Agent to read its passwords as shell command flags rather than read from its configuration file. To use this feature, add the following settings to the MongoDB Agent's configuration file: