Dear Fulko Hew,
On 5/11/2013 14:42, Fulko Hew wrote:
<snip>
I have instituted exactly this philosophy on the application
developers within my company.
After a few decades of creating and supporting applications and devices,
I came to the conclusion that standalone applications should not be looked
at any differently than 'embedded' applications in dedicated devices
(eg. routers).
After all, even a router is 'just another application'.
This indeed largely coincides with our vision. We would like to collect
granular (performance) information about individual servers/applications
running on particular devices instead of limiting ourselves to gathering
global information about the status of devices in their totality. This
is due to the multi-service nature of our cloud-based back-end, where a
single back-end device is able to host multiple highly heterogeneous
services.
So I then abstracted out the 'common items' that all applications have
and bundled them into a MIB (and implemented a Perl and Java library
that allow our apps (written in those languages only at the moment)
to provide and receive info (snmp get and set) and send traps for
noteworthy items. And these libraries interact with Net-SNMP via AgentX
Thanks for sharing this information!
The abstracted stuff fell into 5 categories:
- Dependencies - All apps 'need' stuff, like files/connections/other
apps, etc
as inputs and outputs. Ie. Things 'this app' depends on to work, and if
a dependency isn't being fulfilled, the app will not work as needed.
This table also holds simple usage and response stats on each
'dependency'
along with traps for up/down, usage threshold alarms and response
time alarms.
- Capacity/resource - Where 'dependencies' are a 'comms' kind of thing
the 'capacity' table, allows the app developers to communicate
info/status
on 'consumable' things an app needs or consumes (buffer pools,
memory, sockets, etc)
And it defines traps for capacity alarms and when the consumption
goes back
to normal.
- Response time - Even though the dependency table has response time info
it is very simple. This table allows you to report _any_ kind of thing
that you want to comminicate the response time of... with thresholds and
good/bad traps.
- SLA Criteria - Allows a designer to communicate the 'things that
should be
measured, and there threshold targets; in order to calculate the
application's
availability for your service level agreement.
- Info - A place to communicate versioning info about application
components,
show and remotely control debug/logging levels, remote restart a
application, etc.
So these tables define the 'things' that should or could be communicated,
now its up to the application designers to populate these tables... put
rows in the tables for each of their applications 'needs', and that will
be different for each application.
So if I understand correctly, you have defined a general MIB that
contains entries for each of these types of information? And
applications themselves decide which information (that relates to their
performance) they want to expose in this MIB structure? How do
applications actual insert their values into the MIB (i.e., how do they
add a row to the appropriate MIB branch)? Does this happen via the
AgentX protocol? If so, do all individual applications need to be
extended with an AgentX component, or do you make use of a single AgentX
module per device that takes care of MIB-related operations for all
applications running on that device?
And then applications also have application specific 'other stuff'
that they
may want to expose, that doesn't fit into the above generic tables.
And where exactly do you put this information and make it addressable
via SNMP? Is this done via an application-specific MIB?
So as you browse a device, these tables let you 'find out what different
things may be running, how they are interconnected, how well they are
running (or not), and provide capacity planning info (and alarms on
'potential
capacity problems so you don't actually have to do capacity planning
until you get 'close' to your 'gee maybe I should start paying attention'
usage level.
May I ask which kind of NMS you are using to gather, store and handle
the SNMP-mediated information? And does an administrator need to
manually initiate the browsing of a device, or is this performed
automatically by the NMS? Remember that we would like to automate the
performance data collection as much as possible due to the dynamic
nature of our back-end infrastructure (i.e., devices might spawn and be
destroyed at run-time, and we would like the performance monitoring to
start/stop automatically when a device is spawned/destroyed).
So I think this design (and implementation) covers the kind of stuff you
are thinking about (and more).
I agree! Your MIB seems fairly elaborate and is likely to exceed our
(initial) needs.
Unfortunately, my implementation is
(at the moment) company proprietary; but I can still 'talk' about it.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank you once more for
replying to our question and for sharing your knowledge and experience
with us. If any of my follow-up questions would be too detailed (given
the proprietary nature of your implementation), please feel free to
simply state so and to limit yourself to answering only those questions
that you feel comfortable about.
Fulko Hew
Best regards,
Maarten Wijnants
--
dr. Maarten Wijnants
Expertise centre for Digital Media (EDM) - Hasselt University
Wetenschapspark 2 - B3590 Diepenbeek
Tel: +32 (0)11 268411 - Mobile: +32 (0)497 341848
Fax: +32 (0)11 268499
E-mail:maarten.wijna...@uhasselt.be
Web:http://research.edm.uhasselt.be/~mwijnants/
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