Forum Discussion
Terje_Gravvold
Nimbostratus
NimbostratusGraphing BigIP v9.x SNMP statistics with Cacti
In conjunction with the latter posts on SNMP mibs and SNMP monitoring on BigIP I want to do my small contribution. A while ago I spent some late hours to dig into the SNMP mibs of BigIP, my goal was to make graphs of BigIP internals in Cacti.
What's Cacti you wonder (www.cacti.net):
acti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool's data storage and graphing functionality. Cacti provides a fast poller, advanced graph templating, multiple data acquisition methods, and user management features out of the box. All of this is wrapped in an intuitive, easy to use interface that makes sense for LAN-sized installations up to complex networks with hundreds of devices.
In other words, just the ting I need to make graphs on a budget! So what I've made is a set of templates that could easily be imported into Cacti for BigIP graphing fun...
Heres that the template currently provides:
- F5 BigIP - Chassis Temperature
- F5 BigIP - Global Connections
- F5 BigIP - Global HTTP 2xx/3xx Responses
- F5 BigIP - Global HTTP Requests
- F5 BigIP - Global HTTP Response Errors
- F5 BigIP - Global HTTP Responses
- F5 BigIP - Global packets/sec
- F5 BigIP - Interface Errors/Drops/Collisions
- F5 BigIP - Interface Traffic (bits/sec)
- F5 BigIP - SSL TPS
- F5 BigIP - TMM memory
- F5 BigIP - VS Connection Rate
- F5 BigIP - VS Connections
- F5 BigIP - VS Traffic (bits/sec)
And here is the link for those of you that got curious:
Click here
So why do I bother you with this SPAM?
1. I want to do my duty and contribute something back to F5 who has "given" me this fantastic product...
2. I want to see if I could get some smart brains on this forum to contribute additions to the template to get it complete. I'm, a) to lasy to do the work my selves, b) Don't have the time, your choise. Either way. take a look at Cacti and this template if you have the time...
Hint: iRules in combination with this template seems temptating to me :-)
Best regards
Terje Gravvold
33 Replies
Hamish_Marson_3
Hmm... Citizens latest template works fine for me on CactiEZ. And I posted some extra templates for things like detailed SSL & Compression stats (Global) as well.
Interface stats should be workign fine. They do on my install... What problems do you see?
Gathering stats by VS is a little tricky... It's not clear from the instructions what you have to do, but basically there's a few extra XML files you need to create by hand (No Web interface for it I'm afraid) that define how to index into the SNMP tables that are returned from queries to gather the data... It's not straight forward. I'm planning on doing it to gather SSL stats on a per VS basis. And some other stats that I have gathered in the past with iControl. But it's barely past the planning stage at the moment I'm afraid.
What problems are you having exactly?
H- JRahm
Admin
The xml files you need are in the zip file, they just need to be moved to the appropriate directory. The interface and vs xml files are bolded in the list below.
cp /var/tmp/f5-bigip-tmm-cpu.pl /usr/local/share/cacti/scripts/
cp /var/tmp/ss_f5-bigip-tmm-memory.php /usr/local/share/cacti/scripts/
cp /var/tmp/f5_bigip_vs.xml /usr/local/share/cacti/resource/snmp_queries/
cp /var/tmp/f5_bigip_ifStat.xml /usr/local/share/cacti/resource/snmp_queries/
Note that this is for a default freeBSD installation, and the cacti path may be different on your system. If so, the files should go to /scripts/ and /resource/snmp_queries/ respectively. - Hamish_Marson_3Sorry Citizen. I didn't mean your instructions. I meant the Cacti instructions on developing queries and how to specify the indexing into SNMP tables wasn't exactly clear... Or at least it's not straight forward and requires a mixture of hand edited XML files, and cacti interface config. And there's no clear flow from which one depends on the other until you've done it a few times.
- JRahmNo worries, I didn't take it that way. I agree with you, the workflow for the different capabilities is very difficult to understand initially...well, it's still difficult to understand. I do what I can :-)
- JRahmLooks like you beat me to it! I haven't been able to test my version yet... :-(
HamishCirrocumulus
That's because I cheated... The .xml file is almost identical to the VS XML file. The only real changes are names/descriptions and OID's. And the graph template is only there to show it is pulling the data. (So it only has current connections in it. Not even Accel & Assist - Although my one here does have those extras).
I'm looking at profiles now. Just trying to decide whether to do separate XML files for each profile type. Or one big one... I think separates might win...
Oh... I need to do pools as well as pool stats... Some things like current active members aren't in the stats. They're a column of the pool itself. And poolmembers as well I suppose...
OrionIs it possible to get at the statistics for the individual TMM's on CMP platforms, such as the 8800, via SNMP/Cacti? I'd like to not only graph the CPU/TMM usage (which I currently do now), but also graph the individual TMM instances, like the performance graphs in the LTM GUI show.
/Alex K.- HamishHmmmm.... I've not seen anything that shows the TMM stats in a table per instance... But I haven't downloaded the MIB's from a 9.4.5 box to see if they're different...
H 
chandru_14815Is there a possibility to add Virtual server, pools, and Nodes status using Cacti?
Can you help me with Templates?- Hamish
Posted By chandru on 01/09/2009 12:45 AM
Is there a possibility to add Virtual server, pools, and Nodes status using Cacti?
Can you help me with Templates?
There's a post on the first page of this thread (From me) with templates & XML files for pool stats.
I have clientSSL profile stats as well, but I have found a bug in cacti that either exports incorrectly, or imports incorrectly sometimes... It manifests with the clientSSL stuff (It may be connected with the troubles cacti has when you edit graph templates & add data sources). I have yet to debug that. The numbers work fine though. It just requires a bit of manual fix-up after importing.
Hamish.
