Forum Discussion

Tony_Augustine_'s avatar
Tony_Augustine_
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Nov 12, 2008

How to persist monitor data or how to records server downtime over a period

Our aim is to record the availability/outage of our servers over a period of time(eg for a month). Traffic to these servers are routed through BIG-IP LTM. We have monitors setup in F5 to monitor the availability of nodes and pools. However I don't think the monitors are storing the response status anywhere, but just display the "red" or "green" status based on the latest monitor response. So if you know a way to achieve this(either through monitors or something else) in BIG-IP LTM let me know.

 

For example we need to find out over a given period of time how much time a particular node/pool or vs was available/unavailable

 

 

thanks

 

Tony
management
monitoring
  • JRahm's avatar
    JRahm
    Icon for Admin rankAdmin
    Nov 13, 2008
    If a monitor is applied, there should be a record of the pool member failing and recovering in the /var/log/ltm file.
  • hoolio's avatar
    hoolio
    Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
    Nov 13, 2008
    Hi citizen, do you think it would be possible to use Cacti to track/graph this? I'd imagine it would be a huge effort to try and parse the ltm log files and collect uptime stats for each pool member.

     

     

    Aaron
  • JRahm's avatar
    JRahm
    Icon for Admin rankAdmin
    Nov 13, 2008
    The typical polling cycle for cacti is 5 minutes, so if nodes are bouncing in between polls that information might get lost. Nagios would be ideal in this case, as it can perform passive service checks. If the LTM enables snmp traps for host down/up messages, then the traps can be sent to a Nagios server which will mark the service (pool member) as down/up, and will track availability metrics.
  • Tony_Augustine_'s avatar
    Tony_Augustine_
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Nov 13, 2008
    Citizen

     

    Thanks a lot for your input.It is very valuable. I need to download and play around with Cacti and Nagios. Can you tell me either of them have some sort of persistence mechanism (databse or something like that) so that I can pull out the data even after years. The reason is as per SLA, we need to prove it to our client that our services where up & running 99.9% of the time. Also can we configure the polling frequency with Cacti or Nagios according to our requirements.

     

     

    thanks again

     

    Tony
  • JRahm's avatar
    JRahm
    Icon for Admin rankAdmin
    Nov 13, 2008
    Cacti stores data in round robin databases, so there's nothing audit worthy in there. On Nagios, I'm not sure. If you need audit data, I'd recommend archiving your LTM logfiles and writing a script to parse the logs to calculate availability by pool member and/or by virtual server.