Passing member state to a web GUI?

What do you mean, "pass directly to a web pool?"

 

 

If what you are trying to do is create a web dashboard that displays the state of all your pool members, there's a bunch of ways you could do that, but you'll need a way of keeping their state.

 

 

Polling every F5 in your plant for the status of 1400 servers is not a good idea. Your data will invariably be stale, and not very useful. It's also somewhat abusive to the F5s, which for all their magnificent manageability can be a bit rickety in this department if the user is not careful.

 

 

Basically, you want the F5 to tell you when the state of a service has changed. This can be done in a number of ways:

 

 

1) log events. The F5s will log pool member state changes. By pointing them to a single syslog server, you have a nice, central place to capture state change data.

 

2) SNMP traps. A number of commercial and open-source network management systems can be configured to receive state change data from the device. Many of these will even provide you with a dashboard view of this data in a web page out of the box.

 

3) iControl. I haven't experimented with this personally, but from what I recall iControl has some facility for event handlers that could do whatever your heart desires -- if you can code it.

 

 

Option 1 is by far the easiest. All you need to do is cobble together a little Perl script that watches the log, and saves any updates in a file (a tied hash, for instance) which could in turn be read by a CGI to produce a basic status page, which will always be accurate to a few seconds and incur no additional resource cost or stability risk on your F5 plant.