Passing member state to a web GUI?

You could either populate the state machine with an initial poll of the pool member state, or trigger a state change somehow. You could do a 'bigstart restart' on the standby F5, for instance -- this will cause the monitoring daemons to restart, check every service, and output its status to syslog, where you can pick it up.

 

 

I recommend taking a closer look at the syslog-ng documentation. It is not only what the F5 runs natively to log locally and send events out, it's a great way to collect data from many systems into an aggregation syslog-ng server, which can automatically organize the data hierarchically for you. There are a lot of nice products you can then implement on top of this centralized log server to do indexing, alerting, and integration with other enterprise systems.

 

 

For instance, we use Splunk, which provides a Google-like interface to all of our logs, as well as fairly sophisticated alerting that is triggered based on individual events or combinations of events from the logs collected by syslog-ng from our various infrastructure components and application servers. Splunk is a commercial product, but inexpensive enough for what it provides.

 

 

Whatever you end up doing, good luck, and keep us posted.