monitoring agent can't connect to replica set with auth enabled

Question

I have a replica set with auth enabled. All members are able to authenticate to each other with internal authentication (keyfile) and replication is working fine. I installed a monitoring agent in one of the mebers and it connects to mongo cloud.

The problem is that the monitoring agent is not able to authenticate to the replica set. I know that because mongo cloud shows a warning.

A Monitoring Agent was unable to establish a connection to this host because of an authentication error. Please check the monitoring agent log for details.

And the logs say:

Error: Failure during discovery.

I know it is not a discovery issue because if I start the replica set without auth enabled then mongo cloud shows everything normal.

Question

What I need to know is how to tell the monitoring agent what user and password to use to authenticate to the replica set. I looked through the documentation but I couldn't find it. However I did find this:

If your MongoDB deployment enforces access control, the Cloud Manager Monitoring Agent must authenticate to MongoDB as a user with the proper access.

https://docs.cloudmanager.mongodb.com/reference/required-access-monitoring-agent/

I can create the user with the correct roles but it doesn't say how to configure the monitoring agent to use that user and password.

Answer 1

After looking some more in the documentation I was finally able to find the way to do it, but I am not 100% convinced this is the correct way because the documentation marks this section as deprecated, but I can't find anything else on this subject.

You can edit the configuration file for the monitoring agent and add these two options to specify user and password that it will use:

/etc/mongodb-mms/monitoring-agent.config

globalAuthUsername=mms-monitoring-agent
globalAuthPassword=password

https://docs.cloudmanager.mongodb.com/reference/monitoring-agent/#msetting.globalAuthUsername

After editing the file restart the monitoring agent.

EDIT:

I was not using the automation agent that is why I needed to do it manually. If you are using the automation agent then this can be done through the UI in mongo cloud.