Forum Discussion

smp_86112's avatar
smp_86112
Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
Sep 17, 2009

answering question based on b conn output

It seems that a simple 
b conn all show all
output has really useful information. For example, I could answer important questions, like "Which client has the highest number of connections to a particular VIP?", or "Which VIP has the highest number of connections", or simply output the top 10 clients with the highest number of connections to any VIP. Has anyone written anything to output this type of information? At one time I had started to expand on a shell script I got from F5, but I was hoping someone had already done the heavy lifting.
management
monitoring
  • The_Bhattman's avatar
    The_Bhattman
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Sep 17, 2009
    Here you go:

     

     

    b conn | grep | awk '{print $1 }' | cut -d : -f 1 | uniq -c | sort

     

     

     

    This should sort and count the number of connections for the VIP.

     

     

     

    Be aware that b conn will display a maximum ~7K connections only:

     

     

    Click here to see the ask.f5.com solution article that talks about the limitation.

     

     

    I hope this helps

     

    CB

     

     

  • smp_86112's avatar
    smp_86112
    Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
    Sep 17, 2009
    Thank you, though I have already seen this and a couple other similar commands. There are quite a number of questions I have asked myself that could be answered by these types of commands - I just haven't generated all the commands myself yet.

     

     

    For example, a while back we suddenly saw our baseline number of connections jump from 500k to 1.5M. It would have been nice to simply run a shell script that showed me the number of connections open by each client, and the number of connections open to each VIP. If I would have had the ability to quickly answer those questions, I could have diagnosed what was going on much more quickly (the DNS vulnerability patch sent out a while back changed how DNS responses worked, which had a dramatic impact on our connection table). Instead while I was able to figure it out, it took me a while.

     

     

    My question isn't necessarily exactly what commands can I use to get that information - I can probably figure that out myself, but just haven't had a chance to do it yet. I just thought that it might be likely that someone else had already needed to answer many of the same questions, and already had a script for it.

     

     

    I'm just lazy.
  • hoolio's avatar
    hoolio
    Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
    Sep 17, 2009
    As CB noted, 'b conn' will only return 7037 connections. So it wouldn't do you too much good if you have well over that anyhow.

     

     

    You might try opening a case with F5 Support and ask them for suggestions and open an RFE if they don't have a solution.

     

     

    Aaron
  • smp_86112's avatar
    smp_86112
    Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
    Sep 17, 2009
    Oh, yeah, duh... the connection to the SOL didn't click until your post. How discouraging though. I can only display .5% of all the active connections on my box? That is ridiculous.