Performance issues using iControl

Raja,

 

 

Since you said that you are sampling small amounts of data quite frequently, I'm surprised you are experiencing performance issues with regards to the speed of execution of the iControl calls. The only instance we have seen having to do with performance is when using java on certain platforms. It seems that the random number generation in the client toolkits needed to establish the ssl connection can be quite costly on certain platforms.

 

 

Have you looked at some of the new "bulk" methods added in recent releases. There are now various "get_all_*" type calls to retrieve all statistics for class of objects (nodes, vips, etc). This reduces the need for a separate connection per object entity.

 

 

With that being said, you can get the data via a terminal session using the bigpipe command but you will have to parse the text output from the command which is not guaranteed to stay consistent between releases. In my opinion, this would be a maintenance nightmare.

 

 

As for historical data, currently BIG-IP only stores current data and it is up to a monitoring application that you would build to pull that data off and archive it.

 

 

-Joe