Sneak Peak at Comtrade Management Pack for F5 BIG-IQ

A good part of having a blog that sometimes you are being contacted to have a look at new solutions. Fro such new solution I was contacted by F5 and Comtrade. Comtrade is developing a Management Pack for SCOM that will monitor F5 BIG-IQ devices. Trough monitoring BIG-IQ the soloution provides also monitoring for BIG-IP.

Let’s see what are the requirements for this solution:

• Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2012 or Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2012 SP1 or Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2012 R2
• F5 BIG-IQ 4.3.0
• Comtrade F5 BIG-IQ MP requires .NET Framework version 3.5 SP1 installed
• TCP 443 opened to the BIG-IQ devices
• Administrator account in BIG-IQ

What is available in the MP:

• Discovery, visualization and dynamic update of F5 BIG-IQ appliances topology
• Discovery of F5BIGIQ appliance objects
• BIG-IQ
  • Tenants
    • Catalogs – Applications
    • Virtual Servers
  • BIG-IP Devices
  • Cloud Connectors
    • Nodes
  • Disk Partitions
• Monitoring
  • BIG-IQ (Availability, CPU utilization, Disk partition available space, Disk partition utilization, memory utilization)
  • BIG-IP (Availability, CPU utilization, Disk partition available space, Disk partition utilization, memory utilization)
  • Cloud Connectors (Cloud connector availability)
  • Tenants
  • Catalogs – Applications (Application availability status, application’s active member count)
  • Virtual Servers (Virtual server availability, server-side connection number for virtual server, client-side connection number for virtual server)
  • Nodes (Availability of tenant nodes, server-side number of connections on nodes for port 80, server-side number of connections on nodes for port general, total number of connections on nodes)
• Statistics
  • BIG-IQ (CPU utilization, memory utilization, disk partition free space and utilization)
  • BIG-IP (CPU utilization, memory utilization, disk partition free space and utilization)
  • Tenants
    • Catalogs – Applications (application availability and active members)
    • Virtual Servers (server-side connection number on virtual servers, client-side connection number on virtual servers)
    • Nodes (server-side connection number on node port 80, server-side connection number on node port general, server-side in-packets on node port general, server-side out-packets on node port general, server-side bits-in on node port general, server-side bits-out on node port general)
• Views (Diagram, Alert, State and Dashboard)

How it works:

1. Comtrade F5 BIG-IQ is installed on one SCOM Management Server. The installation provides the MP and Comtrade MPBIG-IQ Agent. The agent is used for communicating with the REST API of F5 BIG-IQ.
2. Comtrade MPBIG-IQ Agent is installed on every SCOM Management server that will participate in the BIG-IQ monitoring. SCOM Management Servers are designated trough Resource Pool in SCOM.
3. Create Network discovery either SNMP or ICMP or both and include the BIG-IQ IP address. Assign the discovery to a SCOM Resource Pool. If needed create new resource pool.
4. Create Run As account and enter the account with administrator rights for the BIG-IQ device/s. For distribution choose more secure and add the resource pool.
5. Assign the run as account to F5 BIG-IQ Appliance Action Account profile.

With these easy steps you are ready for monitoring. Here are some screenshots to give you more detailed view for the solution:

There is also a good video that shows the installation and configuration steps as well as overview:

As this is first beta version there is always room for improvement which I’ve gave as feedback to Comtrade. Here is what is good and what can be improved:

Good:

• Uses BIG-IQ REST API for monitoring
• Monitors takes advantage of recalculate option
• BIG-IQ topology discovery
• A lot of performance data is gathered
• Easy setup and configuration
• MP Administration view
• Monitor of BIG-IP and BIG-IQ components like Memory, Cores and Partitions
• Monitor of BIG-IQ Cloud Connectors
• Taking advantage of SCOM Resource pools and Network Discovery
• Good Comtrade F5 BIG-IQ Management Pack documentation
• You can put in maintenance individual objects like BIG-IP device

Room for improvement:

• SCOM 2012 Dashboards
• More performance rules
• Reports

This overview is subject of change as it is based on beta version of Comtrade F5 BIG-IQ Management Pack.

If you are interested in the solution I guess you can always contact Comtrade for more information. Support for F5 BIG-IQ 4.4.0 is expected.