New F5 Monitoring Pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
Comtrade now offers two flavors of monitoring packs integrating F5 into Systems Center. Last October, Comtrade introduced a Monitoring Pack that took advantage of F5’s BIG-IQ to display BIG-IPs, monitor device and application health and more - all in Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. Now, Comtrade has expanded their offering with a Management Pack that works directly with BIG-IPs - and does not require BIG-IQ. Why is this needed? Well simply, most customer don't yet have BIG-IQ. And while we would like to change that, the new MP dramatically increases the immediately addressable market - and makes integration of BIG-IPs into SCOM simple and straight forward. If you have BIG-IPs and use SCOM, try out the monitoring pack.It’s worth having. The Comtrade Management Pack for F5 BIG-IP enables IT teams to monitor F5 devices with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM). With Management Pack customers will will be able to: See all virtual servers, organized by application service or by device, without leaving SCOM Easily monitor multiple BIG-IP devices from one pane of glass Address issues early and maximize availability of configured application service and virtual server by providing expected QoS level Act as soon as the issue is detected and make sure application services are operating with expected QoS level and diminish danger of device becoming unavailable due to reboot or due to disk being full Monitor SSL Certificate status Find all applications configured on a specific BIG-IP device Monitor load on virtual servers, find the least and the most used virtual server configured on specific device and optimize device configuration to provide expected quality of service View application availability to service user requests and identify root cause for either poor performance or unavailability Protect configured application services and make sure no single point of failure exists in HA setup and HA setup is working as expected A free trial is available here.Monitoring BIG-IP on Microsoft’s System Center with the Comtrade Management Pack for F5 BIG-IQ
Comtrade has released a Management Pack (MP) for Microsoft Systems Center (SCOM ) that uses F5’s BIG-IQ to monitor F5 BIG-IP devices and the applications they are helping deliver. The MP allows users to view all BIG-IP objects and see key information about their performance and health. This management pack will be of great interest to all customers using Microsoft Systems Center. 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 or BIG-IQ 4.4.0 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 F5 BIG-IQ appliance objects BIG-IQ Tenants Catalogs – Applications Virtual Servers BIG-IP Devices Cloud Connectors Nodes CPU Memory Disk Partitions SSL Certificates What will the MP Monitor? 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 iApp 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) BIG-IQ SSL certificates (Availability and validity) 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 – main steps? 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 an SNMP based Network device discovery and include the BIG-IQ IP address. Create a new SCOM Resource Pool. Assign the discovery to the 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: Figure 1: Diagram View (Topology) of BIG-IQ infrastructure Figure 2: BIG-IP appliance and its components being monitored Figure 3: Tenants & Applications dashboard view Figure 4: View of all active alerts for BIG-IQ Figure 5: Alert details offers additional information about the issue Figure 6: On demand monitoring – Health recalculation Figure 7: Administration View Here is also a good video that shows the installation and configuration steps as well as overview: Product video: http://www.youtube.com/embed/yAhBk8cSPn0 Product page: www.comtradeproducts.com/f5 Microsoft Blog about the MP for F5: http://www.systemcentercentral.com/sneak-peak-at-comtrade-management-pack-for-f5-big-iq/
