F5 & Cisco ACI Essentials - ServiceCenter: One stop shop for IP address facts

Having to debug a network issue can be a daunting task, involving 100's of IP address's spread across your entire deployment. Imagine having a tool which can help with getting all the information you want of an IP address with a click of a button. The F5 ACI ServiceCenter is one such tool designed to do exactly that and more. To refresh your knowledge on the tool:

Telemetry streaming

Let's get into the nuts and bolts of getting the entire benefit from visibility from the ServiceCenter. BIG-IP has a great component as part of its automation toolchain called 'Telemetry streaming'. The ServiceCenter takes advantage of telemetry streaming (TS) to grab traffic statistics from the BIG-IP.

Integration TS with the ServiceCenter is a two step process:

Step 1: Download and install the TS RPM package on the BIG-IP(no cost, no license)

Step 2:Configure the TS consumer on the BIG-IP which the ServiceCenter will poll. Use a tool like POSTMAN or Curl to POST the below API to the BIG-IP.

URI: https://<BIG-IP MGMT IP address>/mgmt/shared/telemetry/declare

Payload:

 {
   "class":"Telemetry",
   "My_Poller":{
      "class":"Telemetry_System_Poller",
      "interval":0,
      "actions":[
         {
            "includeData":{              
            },
            "locations":{
               "virtualServers":{
                  ".*":{                    
                  }
               },
               "pool":{
                  ".*":{                    
                  }
               }
            }
         }
      ]
   },
   "My_System":{
      "class":"Telemetry_System",
      "enable":"true",
      "systemPoller":[
         "My_Poller"
      ]
   },
   "My_Pull_Consumer":{
      "class":"Telemetry_Pull_Consumer",
      "type":"default",
      "systemPoller":[
         "My_Poller"
      ]
   }
}

IP Address facts

Once logged into the ServiceCenter from the APIC controller choose the telemetry consumer to retrieve the IP address statistics.

Conclusion

The ServiceCenter besides the statistics will give much more information like the active connections on the BIG-IP, the physical port on which the IP is active (Virtual IP or node IP) on both the BIG-IP and the Cisco ACI, filtered logs from the BIG-IP and much more. To learn more check out the video below on the latest App enhancements and example use cases: