Gathering Data From F5 BIG

[Mr. Pull]

First, Cacti rocks...

I am looking to replace a homegrown (and bug riddled) bandwidth collection app and I am evaluating Cacti. I need to be able to gather stats from an Active/Passive pair of F5 BigIPs. I will need to gather stats per VIP, and would like to be able to summarize a number of VIPs into a single graph with sum of the traffic of these VIPs as well as a 95th% Calculation.

Does anyone have any experience with Cacti + F5 BigIP's?

Is anyone interested in a "code bounty" to implement this feature and/or document how to do it?

Let me know if this makes sense. Also, any recomendations of commercial products would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Mr.

[khutton]

If you know how to read a mib then I suggest you take a look at the mib fo the f5 load balancing scheme. The F5 mib is actually located in the /usr/contib/f5/mibs dir on the actual F5 box. You can retreive it and load it onto your cacti box. The excerpt below is a piece of of the mib that pplies to what you are trying to do.


virtualServerOctetsIn OBJECT-TYPE
SYNTAX Counter32
MAX-ACCESS read-only
STATUS current
DESCRIPTION
"The number of octets received from the network for this
virtual server."
::= { virtualServerEntry 13 }

virtualServerOctetsOut OBJECT-TYPE
SYNTAX Counter32
MAX-ACCESS read-only
STATUS current
DESCRIPTION
"The number of octets sent to the network from this virtual
server."
::= { virtualServerEntry 14 }

virtualServerPacketsIn OBJECT-TYPE
SYNTAX Counter32
MAX-ACCESS read-only
STATUS current
DESCRIPTION
"The number of packets received from the network from this
virtual server."
::= { virtualServerEntry 15 }

virtualServerPacketsOut OBJECT-TYPE
SYNTAX Counter32
MAX-ACCESS read-only
STATUS current
DESCRIPTION
"The number of packets sent to the network from this virtual
server."
::= { virtualServerEntry 16 }

I will be looking to do this once I get an NBAR problem worked out with Deano's help. I am looking to do it for a single box but you should be able to use some of it for a multi box setup. Since your using active/passive you might be able to use all of it.

A quick example is this:

snmp# snmpget -c community 192.168.25.18 .virtualServerOctetsIn.172.16.1.2.80
LOAD-BAL-SYSTEM-MIB::virtualServerOctetsIn.172.16.1.2.80 = Counter32: 261481549

You will notice that the snmp query takes .virtualServerOctetsIn.IPADDRESSANDPORT and returns the total http octet count to that virtual server.
To get http octets from you would use .virtualServerOctetsOut.172.16.1.2.80.
To get https octets to use .virtualServerOctetsIn.172.16.1.2.443
To get https octets from use .virtualServerOctetsOut.172.16.1.2.443

You can change the ip address to correspond to all the different VIP's you have and get all the counts. As far as organizing all of this into one easy to use graph, I am no programmer by any stretch, I would just collect the data and graph each set of data on the same graph. Or if you could get someone to write a script I would certainly use it .

Hope this helps.
Kevin

[apollock]

Hi,

I'm just putting the finishing touches to a Perl script that queries a pair of BIG-IPs, and returns graphable information about virtual servers from the active one.

It can be done. It's relatively trivial. The hard work is making Cacti use it.

regards

Andrew