Need a hand on data query writing.

daleg · Post by **daleg** » Thu Nov 10, 2005 8:52 pm

I'm trying to write a Data Query for monitoring fibre channel switches which use the industry-standard Fibre Alliance (FA) MIB.

So I have this switch whose SNMP Agent uses this MIB. It's a 20-port switch. As you can imagine, there are a variety of stats available for each port. But here's the problem I'm running into - there's no ifIndex or equivalent to go off of. There is one OID that tells me how many ports there are, though. Naturally, a query to it returns "20"

The OIDs for the individual ports' stats are like the following, such as "CRC Errors":

1.3......blah.blah.3.0
1.3......blah.blah.3.1
...
1.3......blah.blah.3.19

And then TX frames are like:

1.3......blah.blah.12.0
1.3......blah.blah.12.1
...
1.3......blah.blah.12.19

As you get the gist, the interface's numbers are the last member of the OID. I am trying to take Values such as the TX frames, RX frames, CRC errors and so on and graph each port's stats on one graph for each port.

the problem I have is that I can't seem to find a reliable way to derive an index. I'm using the hexadecimal-type port address OID (fibre channel port addresses are in hex) but I always get 21 results returned when I do a debug query in the Device control panel... and I never ever seem to be able to collect any data (graphs are broken image icons instead)

Cacti seems rather useful as far as its canned query packes are concerned, but writing things from scratch... seems a bit obtuse (ie: When do I use SNMP query vs. SNMP query (Indexed) etc)

anyway, I hope someone can toss me a bone here. I'm probably missing something trivial. Many thanks for any hints and I'll be sure to post the templates here once I get it all working as many fibre channel switches use the FA MIB.

/dale

daleg · Post by **daleg** » Mon Nov 14, 2005 10:25 pm

Alright! I've made progress. Still, I have a problem.

I made a working Data Query XML file, Data Template, and Graph Template and associated them all together.

I added a fiber channel switch to my devices and associated the Data Query I made to to. Poller runs and the expected RRD files appear in the rra directory.

However...

On the graph view page for the switch, I get broken image icons. Looking at it more closely, the local_graph_id it is linking to for the image does not match the number that's tacked onto the generated RRD files.

For example, for port 1, graph.php looks for a local_graph_id of 709, but the RRD file for that port is ff1sw2_traffic_in_897.rrd

I added another switch to the devices in the same manner, and still that offset persists. So it looks like data is being gathered, but Cacti is confused as to what RRD files it should be looking at to generate a graph.

I've attached the Data Query, Data and Graph template files that I'm working with if that helps.

/dale

daleg · Post by **daleg** » Mon Nov 14, 2005 11:02 pm

Well scratch that.

the RRD files are getting made, but they have no data in them. A dump with rrdtool shows dates going back into 2004(!) with all values being NaN.

This is really getting annoying for me!

/dale

stigmata · Post by **stigmata** » Tue Nov 15, 2005 4:53 am

is it possible to post the qlogic_sanbox.xml?

Regards,
stigmata

daleg · Post by **daleg** » Tue Nov 15, 2005 10:32 am

Opps! It's attached.

/dale

rgraves · Post by **rgraves** » Fri Feb 24, 2006 4:47 pm

Well, I've just started trying to do the same. My box is a Cisco 9020, also a 20-port box supporting FCMGMT-MIB and FIBRE-CHANNEL-FE-MIB that doesn't seem to have a useful PortIndex.

Any update from you or elseone?

There is a forum thread on Brocade switches. Have you looked at it? They wrote the original FC management MIB, so maybe it'll apply.

Post by **gandalf** » Sat Feb 25, 2006 10:38 am

Please have a look at the last two links of my signature to understand how to make those queries on your own
Reinhard

rgraves · Post by **rgraves** » Thu Mar 02, 2006 9:17 am

I have 3 fibre channel switches in a fabric. I needed to change

<oid_index_parse>OID/REGEXP:.*\.75\.1\.1\.5\.1\.3\.1\.([0-9]+)$</oid_index_parse>

to
<oid_index_parse>OID/REGEXP:.*\.75\.1\.1\.5\.1\.3\.([0-9]+\.[0-9]+)$</oid_index_parse>

The multipart interface index (1.20 through 3.20) appears to work fine, with one annoyance: I can't get the graphs ordered sensibly. If I choose Alphabetic, then 1.10 comes before 1.2, and if I choose Data Query Index, the sorting appears random -- 1.6, 1.4, 1.3, 1.7.

Cacti