Monitoring Pool Member Status and Emailing Alerts...

[David_Dennison]

We recently purchased 4 new Bigip's. We will be migrating all our services over to these eventually. Currently on our 4.5.x bigips we use ISM to monitor the status of pool members and send out email alerts when they are detected down and when they come back up.ISM is now EOL and doesn't support the 9.x bigips. We have Enterprise Manager and was under the impression it could do the same type of monitoring and email alerts. Playing around with it, I don't see anything obvious that would accomplish this. It seems mainly for deploying updates patches and config changes.My question is can I do this with EM and icontrol rules to check the status of pool members and send email alerts when node service goes down, and the like.I know from reading you can acheive the same using the syslog and SNMP monitors filters and stuff like that, but I would rather not use this method but rather do it like we used to do it using ISMan.Thanks for any input and suggestions.David

[The_Bhattman]

I don't know anything about ISM or know which one you are refering to (IBM or Cisco). In my opinion, there is alot of maturity that EM needs to go through as I have had it tested in our environment with feedback from my co-workers. However, it is, as you said, possible to develop an iControl to monitor the pool and email alerts, independent of EM.Take a look at the following links that may help you develop and understand iControlClick hereClick hereI know that you mentioned syslog and SNMP monitoring is not something you are not in favor of, but I am curious as to why not? /CB

[Deb_Allen_18]

ISManager was a monitoring and management platform that pre-dates Enterprise Manager. Enterprise Manager is more focused on deployment and general system management tasks, as David mentions, and does not include the monitoring functionality he's after.We do realize that the EOL of ISman did leave a bit a void there, and it's my understanding that product development is already working to address this requirement, so stay tuned.HTH/deb

[JRahm]

Joe has written enough examples in iControl that you could easily put together an iControl application in the language of your choice to poll the status of your vips/pools and send email alerts on them.

[David_Dennison]

Thanks! I'll definately take a look into to these.

[t_mantel_89732]

Hello Bhattman, we did an upgrade from Bigip LTM 9.3.0 HF3 to 10.0.1 HF3 and were using an irule we think was written by you ... this one http://devcentral.f5.com/wiki/default.aspx/iRules/Pool__Member__Status__Page_on_a__Virtual__Server_v10.html The previous version was one of the winner in the irule contest and worked fine for us. Now in version 10.x.x some things and commands are different and so we took your new version of the irule. But we get an error with it, something like that in /var/log/ltm ---- Nov 24 13:36:05 local/tmm err tmm[2365]: 01220001:3: TCL error: bigip-poolstatus - can't read "addr": no such variable while executing "append response " >INVALID [string tolower $poolname]$addr$port$f..." ("foreach" body line 36) invoked from wi thin "foreach { selectedpool } $::pool_member_status_list { if { [catch { scan [split [getfield $se..." invoked from w ithin "if { [HTTP::uri] eq "/_itools/lbstatus" } { set response "itools kl-lbstatus - \ [clock format [cl..." ---- hope you can help us with that. Thank you

[chandru_14815]

Hi Guys, I am also looking for email alerts from F5 to be setup if any of the pools, Virtual server or nodes are down Is there any inbuilt feature which can do this? I have been searching this forum and couldn't find any information I have 8 BigIP's and would like your help to get notificaiton working on this Any help would be highly appreciated regards Chandru

[hooleylist]

Hi Chandru, This post should help get you started: Email notification of node/vs down http://devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=53&view=topic&postid=20167&ptarget=20173 Aaron

[chandru_14815]

Hi Aron, I have managed to setup the alerts and i could send email from BIGIP I have added the alerts for the pool and nodes down and up But i am not receiving any emails. Can you let me know is there any way we can troubleshoot? Thanks C

[David_Dennison]

I still even after purchasing the latest version of Enterprise Manager, have not gotten what I originally posted as a feature. What I I have been relying on is SEC (system even correlator) which which is a daemon that simpy monitors SNMP trap event matches and executes an event (mailx command on a linux machine with SNMPD running is what gets the email to you). It's all cli and flat file ascii configs, but it's not over complex. Just get a linux box running, get SNMPD trap services running, and then install SEC to monitor it. Regardless of that fact, I would of expected by now that Enterprise Manger just by very nature of it's name and being in version 3.x would do what I had to do on my own through freeware, especially since they've known for a long time alerting is a facility VERY lacking in the their suite of products...I mean think about it...if a node goes down, shoudn't a product called F5 ENTERPRISE MANAGER be the station to receive the SNMP traps and be the facility that delivers and stores those events as well as notify through a email. Even though EM v3 is better, it still is nothing more then an over glorified aonfiguration backup and update server.

Anyway, that is what I use, which works fine, but as a company that has invested over $1million dollars in their LTM, ASM, GTM products, I shouldn't have to AD-HOC such a common sense feature with freeware, when I also own a product called ENTERPRISE MANAGER.

[Schusser89_1204]

Was there any response to this, I find myself with the task of getting this done in a very quick timeframe and had hoped the EM could be of assistance.

[What_Lies_Bene1]

With LTM v11, sending emails is pretty simple. Here's a quick rundown; To configure email delivery of alerts edit the /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf file and enter the hostname or IP address of a suitable SMTP server as the mailhub= variable value. Use something like the following command to test your configuration: echo "BIG-IP test mail via ssmtp" | mail -vs "BIG-IP test mail via ssmtp" email@example.com To configure which events result in an alert email, as well as custom SNMP traps, edit the /config/user_alert.conf according to http://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/solutions/public/3000/600/sol3667.html and http://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/solutions/public/3000/700/sol3727.html

[Schusser89_1204]

We are running V10.2 HF4 and need a more automated way of handling alerting - we have 5 sets or LTM's in multiple datacenters with multiple partitions(each with different alerting needs)) and pools.In some older posts I have seen references to Perl scripts to download the config files to use for pool/host resolution but can't find them? It seems pretty difficult to monitor and alert on these boxes in a manner that doesn't require a tremendous amount of care and feeding.