Performance Stats - Where to start??

Do you have a language of choice? Either way, I'd start by downloading some of the examples from the codeshare. Joe has done a lot of work with PowerShell (Click here). THere are perl, python, java, & php examples in the codeshare as well: Click here

Do you have a repository of choice for the stats? If you're using cacti there are some existing SNMP templates. But you could add some iControl templates quite easily too.

 

 

Just be aware that

 

 

1. You can't get all the stats via iControl, for some of them you'll HAVE to go with SNMP (e.g. Host CPU stats).

 

2. iControl is pretty heavy on CPU and memory (Many versions of BigIP have memory leaks around iControl). You can find your devices running out of memory (Linux side) and they become a bit flaky when they start to page (Because sod gets paged out).

 

 

I've used both. Just pulling stats on iControl SHOULD be OK. But be aware that if ou do things like traversing the config pulling VS & pool info too often you'll probably run out of memory before long. And chew up anything up to 25% CPU of a 6400 doing it (YMMV depending on version).

 

 

 

 

H

Thanks for the heads up. We are currently using 1600's.

 

 

Right now, I don't have a repos. setup yet. Just looking to this.

 

 

If you've got someplace you could install cacti, take a look at this page:

 

 

http://devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=63&articleType=ArticleView&articleId=136

 

I have linux box I can you for a repos. will cacti function on it?

 

 

Thanks.

Cacti will work great on linux. That page will (generall) walk you through a complete install and configuration. Wherever possible, I would use your distribution's standard package management system for installing the required components (MySQL, PHP, apache, and so on). Depending on which distro you're using, simply installing cacti may automatically resolve all of the dependencies. I'm thinking specifically of Ubuntu or Debian, with others, YMMV.

I have built cacti from ground up several times on linux and windows, but having just gone through the CactiEZ install...that's definitely the way to go. You get ntop and nagios to boot as well! Download the .iso, burn a disk, install to an available machine, you're up and running from start to finish in an hour or less. You can get CactiEZ here: Click here

 

 

BTW, Cacti works very well with SNMP and has the most documentation surrounding that method, but you could easily also use scripted queries via PHP/Perl/etc utilizing iControl. It's a lot less intuitive with this approach (for me anyway), but it can be done.