Capturing load balancer traffic flows is not something that is elegantly (or even rudimentarily) handled by most commercial applications, or at least the ones I've worked with. Several can't even gather statistics on the F5 appliances because they lack the ability to index mibs. Earlier this year, I worked through the process of building a Cacti server in the lab. With the help of some excellent templates I found on the Cacti forums, I was able to successfully graph my virtual servers, interfaces, and memory.

CPU templates didn't exist, so I added this functionality and corrected some of the problems in the templates as I worked through my installation. In summary, this article will walk the user through the steps required to install & configure Cacti to begin monitoring the F5 LTM Global Traffic, Virtual Server Traffic, Interface Traffic, Memory, & CPU. Cacti Prerequisites This tech tip assumes the packages below are already installed. My version is in parentheses. • Web Server (apache, version 2.2.4) • MySQL (version 5.0.27) • PHP (version 5.2.1) • Perl (version 5.8.7) • NET-SNMP (version 5.2.3) • RRDTOOL (1.2.15) Note 1: All the tools above on my system were installed via the BSD ports tree, so all the dependencies were solved automatically. If you are not experience in resolving dependencies, I highly recommend a system that solves them for you.

Bigip, F5 BIG-IP LTM (v9), 0.8.7e, 2010/05/26, yes, yreddy F5 BIG-IP LTM vitalsecurity, Finjan Vital Security, 0.8.7e, 2010/03/16, yes, yreddy finjan, vital security, proxy freebsd, FreeBSD host template (ps, cpu, memory, gmirror, raid, TCP connections, mailstats, spam, apcups, smart, ntp, ports, ipfw.), works with pfSense. Jan 22, 2008 The latest F5 cacti templates. For Host Template, choose F5 BigIP. 2 thoughts on “ Monitoring your LTM/BIGIP through Cacti ”.

Note 2: All the commands below reflect my system, so you may have to alter them if you install these packages into different directories. Cacti Installation Extract Cacti • Get Cacti () and place in /var/tmp/ • cd /usr/local/share/ • tar xvfz /var/tmp/cacti-0.8.7.tar.gz • mv cacti-0.8.7 cacti Create Cacti DB in MySQL Note: have your mysql root password ready • mysqladmin --user=root -p create cacti • mysql --user=root -p cacti /dev/null 2>&1 Configure Apache for Cacti • vi /usr/local/etc/apache22/httpd.conf AllowOverride None Order allow,deny Allow from all Alias /cacti/ /usr/local/share/cacti/ Log in for the 1st time! After install unable to create graphs for the the default localhost or ltms I created.

Apache logs show ERROR: opening '/usr/local/cacti/rra/localhost_mem_buffers_3.rrd': No such file or directory ERROR: opening '/usr/local/cacti/rra/localhost_users_6.rrd': No such file or directory ERROR: opening '/usr/local/cacti/rra/localhost_load_1min_5.rrd': No such file or directory ERROR: opening '/usr/local/cacti/rra/localhost_proc_7.rrd': No such file or directory and sure enough there are no.rrd files in /usr/local/cacti/rra pretty much stuck with the versions in this howto. Running on a linux (centos) box - anyone have any ideas?

We have BIG-IP 9.4.4 Build 65.1 Final. I follow all this tutorial and works well. I have problem at adding bigip device. Here is my problem: I can add the BigIP device and it also shows no error. But under the graph template, it shows status as not being graphed. I can do snmpwalk on all the OID on host template file (I mean files under F5_v9_host_template).

Thank you very much for your quick reply. I check the permission and I am running as a root user.

Permission seems to be okay. When adding device, under 'Associated Data Queries' section, I can see following output: 1) F5 BigIP - Interface Statistics (Verbose Query) Uptime Goes Backwards Success [0 Items, 0 Rows] Reload Data Query Delete Data Query Association 2) F5 BigIP - VS Statistics (Verbose Query) Uptime Goes Backwards Success [0 Items, 0 Rows] There shuold be some numbers instead of Success [0 Items, 0 Rows], rt? When I click at 'Verbose Query' under debugging, it shows following error message under 'Data Query Debug Information': + Running data query [18]. + Found type = '3' [snmp query]. + Could not find data query XML file at 'path_cacti/resource/snmp_queries/f5_bigip_ifStat. Drivers Gemini First Mix Pro With Vdj. xml' + Error parsing XML file into an array.

+ Could not find data query XML file at 'path_cacti/resource/snmp_queries/f5_bigip_ifStat.xml' + Could not find data query XML file at 'path_cacti/resource/snmp_queries/f5_bigip_ifStat.xml' + Could not find data query XML file at 'path_cacti/resource/snmp_queries/f5_bigip_ifStat.xml'. Same type of error for 'F5 BigIP - VS Statistics': + Running data query [17]. + Found type = '3' [snmp query]. + Could not find data query XML file at 'path_cacti/resource/snmp_queries/f5_bigip_vs.xml' + Error parsing XML file into an array. + Could not find data query XML file at 'path_cacti/resource/snmp_queries/f5_bigip_vs.xml' + Could not find data query XML file at 'path_cacti/resource/snmp_queries/f5_bigip_vs.xml' + Could not find data query XML file at 'path_cacti/resource/snmp_queries/f5_bigip_vs.xml' Thanks, RB.

Here's the httpd/error_log entry related to my issue above: PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 92160 bytes) in /usr/local/cacti/lib/tree.php on line 416, referer: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 128 bytes) PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 92160 bytes) in /usr/local/cacti/lib/tree.php on line 348, referer: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 128 bytes). I've got an issue where certain OID's are returning 0. Specifically 'F5 BigIP - Global HTTP Requests', 'F5 BigIP - Global HTTP Response Errors', and 'F5 BigIP - Global HTTP Responses'. If I manually snmpget those OID's I can validate the '0' response: [root@nms102 tmp]# snmpget -v 2c -c blah 10.70.1.57.1.3.6.1.4.1.3375.2.1.1.2.4.7.0 SNMPv2-SMI::enterprises.3375.2.1.1.2.4.7.0 = Counter64: 0 [root@nms102 tmp]# snmpget -v 2c -c blah 10.70.1.57.1.3.6.1.4.1.3375.2.1.1.2.4.5.0 SNMPv2-SMI::enterprises.3375.2.1.1.2.4.5.0 = Counter64: 0 [root@nms102 tmp]# snmpget -v 2c -c blah 10.70.1.57.1.3.6.1.4.1.3375.2.1.1.2.4.6.0 SNMPv2-SMI::enterprises.3375.2.1.1.2.4.6.0 = Counter64: 0 Though there's plenty of traffic being handled. Any suggestions? @citizen_elah thanks for the info -- I was unaware of the existence of stats profiles.

I dug around on the F5 and see it now. I also did some more digging with snmpwalk and noticed the F5s are keeping http stats per http profile. Ex: there's a ltmHttpProfileStatNumberReqs.' Http', ltmHttpProfileStatNumberReqs.' Http-lan-optimized-caching', ltmHttpProfileStatNumberReqs.' Http-wan-optimized-compression', etc.

As well as the same for ltmFastHttpProfileStatNumberReqs.' For the pools I want to track, I created new http profiles for use by the vservers using the pools, so now I have a ltmHttpProfileStatNumberReqs.'

Http-api' and similar. Now I need to figure out how to add graphs for these to cacti -- I'm not much of a cacti expert. Anyway, mostly rambling to myself, but I thought someone else might find the tracking per http profile useful as well. I'm imagining it will save some overhead over using iRules to populate. Citizen_elah - did you find a hero?

Someone who found a way to index the pool name and loop through the pool members for data? I know it's like 2 years later but I just started writing iControl apps and just came across this article describing 'the use of wget' as a data method in place of SNMP - for basically the same reasons. Manual Flash Starblitz 320 Btz Air on this page.

So i started thinking, 'woah.if cacti supports http as the data input method, i should be able to use that some how with this iControl app, right?' So, i wrote an app that reads in a pool name from the URL, queries the LTM, runs through the pool building the array, then dumps it to the screen in the Cacti format needed.then I just graph it! Basically, if I have a web_pool with 192.168.1.1:801 and 192.168.1.2:802, where 801 has 23 conns and 802 has 15, then my app runs through that pool, grabs the counters, and then displays it to the screen like this: 19216811p86812p802:15 then, from Cacti, I use wget --quiet --no-cache -O - running my app]/default.aspx?pooldata=web_pool to grab it! It's completely changing the flexibility of what i can graph and how we look at 'what the LTM' is doing and, what's really cool, now, is I am can pull data from both sets of boxes in both of our data centers and merge the data into one graph - so I can get a 'total picture' of all web requests (for example) being handled in both data centers at the same time in one graph! Anyway, i am just looking on devcentral to see if anyone else has done this so I can contribute. This is the site that got me thinking about it: http://penguinman-techtalk.blogspot.com/2009/03/cacti-graphing-remote-service-without.html.

Huge set of templates here for BigIP v10. Broadly I've tried to pull out most of the useful stuff from the Global and LTM MIBs. File comment: Pool Member - packets per second in/out eg.png [ 61.94 KiB Viewed 25332 times ] I think these are a good improvement over the previous v9 graphs but needs some testing on various platforms. So please let me know. N Attachments: File comment: Updated version: rename as v9 is supported, a few patches mentioned in the thread [46.53 KiB] Downloaded 1970 times File comment: Host Template and Data Query XMLs [49.28 KiB] Downloaded 4203 times _________________ Aruba MC: Bind 9.6 stats: Cisco VLAN Stats: forums.cacti.net/viewtopic.php?t=26800 DHCPD stats: Enterasys CPU: F5 BigIP v10: Last edited by on Tue Nov 27, 2012 8:12 pm, edited 2 times in total. Hi, First of all - thanks very much for the v10-templates! I've got them running under Version 0.8.7h by importing 'cacti_host_template_f5_bigip_v1.xml' followed by all the other '.xml's from your zip-file via the gui.

The only issue I'm having is this: When I add a new host and go for 'Create Graphs for this Host' I'm getting 'Error in data query.' For Data Query [F5 BigIP - Interface Statistics] Data Query [F5 BigIP - LTM Member Statistics] Data Query [F5 BigIP - LTM Pool Statistics] Data Query [F5 BigIP - LTM VS Statistics] I'm enclosing a screenshot sou you get the idea of how this looks like. Thanks much in advance for any clue, -ewald Attachments: f5-error-while-generate-graphs.jpg [ 120.01 KiB Viewed 25207 times ]. $ pwd /var/www/cacti/resource/snmp_queries $ ls -1 f5_bigip*xml f5_bigip_if.xml f5_bigip_ltm_member.xml f5_bigip_ltm_pool.xml f5_bigip_ltm_vs.xml Hi, Well sure, I missed this completely. Now I've got all the xml-files in place, don't get any of the errors mentioned above, but unfortunately all F5 related graphs only show up empty. Whichever graph I select, be it 'F5 Global - Connection Rate' or 'F5 TMM - CPU Cycles' I only get 'nan' values.

The cacti log file doesn't hold any meaningful information, esp no error messages. Also note that cacti can contact the F5-box in question since I get the system status including hostname, uptime etc. Displayed for the device. The box in question runs BIG-IP 10.2.3 Build 112.0 Final; my cacti-version is 0.8.7h. Any ideas as to why I don't get any F5-related data into Cacti? Thanks much for your help, -ewald. Many of the oids in the MIB returned empty for my system and these are mostly not included here.

YMMV depending on your model. You are running a very similar version to me so I imagine this is a platform issue, and I would guess you're not running a Viprion. Vendors unfortunately are not always consistent with their snmp support. So a solution. I would bet that this information is available but just in a different part of the MIB. While I was trawling through it I noticed a lot of duplication of the same information in different parts of the tree.

For example interface bytes was in at least 3 places from memory. It may be that some of those alternate oids work for you. I would tackle this by firing up MIB Browser (from ireasoning), load the MIBS (download them from your bigip welcome page), and start searching for working versions of the oids I've got in my templates. MIB Browser is a great (and free) product so shouldn't take too long to find them if they're there. Then you just have to change the oids in the xml and data templates. _________________ Aruba MC: Bind 9.6 stats: Cisco VLAN Stats: forums.cacti.net/viewtopic.php?t=26800 DHCPD stats: Enterasys CPU: F5 BigIP v10.

You are running a very similar version to me so I imagine this is a platform issue, and I would guess you're not running a Viprion. Vendors unfortunately are not always consistent with their snmp support. So a solution.

I would bet that this information is available but just in a different part of the MIB. While I was trawling through it I noticed a lot of duplication of the same information in different parts of the tree. Hi niobe, In the meantime I figured out what the problem was: I configured cacti to query for snmp v1, whereas some variables in the MIBs are 64bit counters. As soon as I changed the device-definition in cacti to use snmp v2 everything worked So as a hint for others probably running into the same problem: Make sure you run snmpv2 when querying an F5 Thanks for your help!