This OBE describes the features that are available for centrally managing and monitoring BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager from Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control.
Approximately 20 minutes
This OBE covers the following topics:
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The Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control System Monitoring Plug-in for BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager delivers comprehensive availability, performance and configuration information for BIG-IP Local Traffic Managers. By combining BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager monitoring with the richest and most comprehensive management of Oracle systems, Enterprise Manager significantly reduces the cost and complexity of managing applications that rely on BIG-IP and Oracle technologies. Application administrators can now consolidate all of the monitoring information in the Enterprise Manager Console, model and view the complete topology of their applications, and perform comprehensive root cause analysis. Network administrators can perform proactive monitoring and detailed configuration analysis for BIG-IP Local Traffic Managers, assess the impact of load balancer performance problems on end-user services, and better align their efforts with business needs. This OBE guides you through all these functionalities.
Before performing the tasks mentioned in the OBE, you should first download the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager Plug-in from OTN. Then import the plug-in into the management repository, deploy the plug-in to the agents, and then discover the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager target from Grid Control.
Administrators need a consistent and consolidated solution for managing the targets within their datacenter. Learning different interfaces or following different procedures for tasks across monitored targets is not a productive use of an administrator's time. Enterprise Manager addresses this problem by providing a consistent look-and-feel across all monitored targets - via target Home pages. Each of these Home pages provides an at-a-glance view of the health and performance of the corresponding target, enabling the administrator to truly manage by exception. Perform the following steps to view the home page for F5 BIGIP Local Traffic Manager to get an overview of the basic functionality:
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Open the browser and enter the following URL: http://<management service hostname>.<domain>:<port>/em/ The default port value on a clean machine is 7777. However, if there are other instances running on the machine, then the port may be different. The login page will be displayed. Enter the User Name and Password, and then click the Login button.
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Click the Targets tab.
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Click the All Targets subtab.
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Select BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager in the Search drop-down list, and click the Go button.
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Click the instance name to navigate to the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager Home page.
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The Home page, similar to any other home page within the Enterprise Manager Console, provides an at-a-glance view of the health and performance of the load balancer. From this page, you obtain the target's status, availability over time, outstanding alerts, and access to additional details via various drilldowns.
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This portion of the lab will illustrate how the System Monitoring
Plug-in for F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager offers immediate value by automatically
monitoring the availability and performance of the load balancer targets. More
than 150 out-of-box performance metrics are monitored for BIG-IP Local Traffic
Manager. In addition to such real-time monitoring of performance metrics, Enterprise
Manager also stores the monitoring information in the management repository,
thereby enabling you to analyze performance through various historical views
and facilitating strategic tasks such as trend analysis and reporting. Perform
the following steps to monitor the availability and performance of F5 BIG-IP
Local Traffic Manager:
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Scroll down and click the All Metrics link in the Related Links section.
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You can see the various metric categories that Enterprise Manager monitors. Some of the key metrics collected include BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager Status, Switch Activity, Virtual Server Statistics, Interface Activity and Server Pools Connections.
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Click the plus (+) sign next to the Switch link to expand it, and click the Memory Utilization (%) metric link.
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From the metric details page that appears, you can see various statistics
concerning this metric as well as a graphical view of its values in real-time,
historical, or your own customized timeframe and how the values compare
with defined thresholds. Alert history is also provided to track past
problems and comments/details about them.
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To aid administrators with critical tasks such as problem diagnosis, trend analysis and capacity planning, the System Monitoring Plug-in for BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager includes eight out-of-box reports, summarizing key information about BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager availability, performance, traffic and configuration. These reports are easily accessible from the BIG-IP Home page in the Enterprise Manager Console and from the Information Publisher (Enterprise Manager's powerful reporting framework), enabling administrators to schedule, share, and customize reports to fit their operations needs. Perform the following steps to view the reports for BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager:
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Navigate back to the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager home page, by clicking on the target locator link.
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Click the Reports subtab.
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Here you see the BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager Configuration report, which provides configuration summary for the load balancer. Click the View Report drop-down. You see a list of reports that are provided out-of-box. They summarize key performance, usage, and configuration information.
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Select the BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager Performance report. This report summarizes key performance statistics for the load balancer, enabling you to easily correlate performance problems.
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Select the BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager Server Pools report. Like this, you can view any of the available reports.
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Click the Home subtab to navigate back to the home page.
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Scroll down and click the Reports link in the Related Links section.
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You can view all of the BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager reports that appear on this page. In addition, you can take advantage of monitoring reports (such as Availability History (Target) or Outstanding Alerts and Policy Violations (Target)), to report on availability and health of their BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager environments. Click the Availability History (Target) report in the Monitoring category and Availability History sub-category.
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Click the Continue button.
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You get to see the availability summary, chart and details for the BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager.
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Tracking configurations is one of the most time-consuming and difficult tasks administrators face on a daily basis. Being able to quickly view a detailed configuration snapshot, analyze historical changes and enforce standardization between systems is key to diagnostics, auditing, compliance, and making solid business decisions
System Monitoring Plug-in for BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager simplifies these tasks by automatically collecting detailed configuration information about BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager. This information is collected daily and stored in the management repository. In addition, Enterprise Manager automatically tracks all changes to the load balancer configuration, helping administrators answer key questions about what changed and when the change was made. System Monitoring Plug-in for BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager also enables enterprise-wide configuration comparisons of the load balancer instances, allowing administrators to quickly and easily pinpoint potential differences. This helps to keep systems synchronized and to reduce "configuration drift". In addition, it simplifies investigations into why systems that are presumed to be identical, are behaving differently. Perform the following steps to manage the configuration of the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager:
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Click the Targets tab.
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Click the All Targets subtab.
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Select BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager from the Search drop-down list, and click the Go button.
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Click the F5 Local Traffic Manager link to navigate to the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager Home page.
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On F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager home page, click the View Configuration link under the Configuration section.
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Enterprise Manager automatically collects configuration information for the load balancer, including details about the switch and virtual servers configuration. By default, this information is collected every 24 hours, but the user can force the collection of new data by clicking the Refresh button on this page. You can view configuration history, compare configurations between BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager instances, and take a snapshot of the current configuration. Click the History button.
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Notice that this page shows all of the configuration changes that occurred on the BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager instance since Enterprise Manager started monitoring it. You can further drill down to see the details for each change.
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The System Monitoring Plug-in for BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager leverages Enterprise Manager's powerful monitoring and event management features for BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager monitoring, thereby delivering a robust monitoring solution through automation, standardization and "manage many-as-one" approach. You can take advantage of the following key features:
Perform the following steps to look at how group functionality is extended to BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager:
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Click the Targets tab.
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Click the Groups subtab.
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Click the Plug-ins group to go to its home page.
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The Plug-ins group contains a number of different plug-ins, including BIG-IP. The group home page presents administrators with summary of the status, alerts and policy violations across all of the members of the group. Click the Charts tab.
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When defining groups, administrators have the ability to include summary charts, which allow them to analyze collective performance of the group members. Here we can see different charts, displaying highest average/ lowest average/or statistical information across targets in the group. As you can see, metrics presented here are from different target types, including metrics from different plug-ins. Click the Launch Dashboard button.
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System Monitoring Dashboard provides administrators with a near real-time view of open alerts against members of the group. The color-coded interface highlights problems using universal colors of alarm - red for critical issues, yellow for warning alerts, and green for normal conditions. The System Monitoring Dashboard significantly reduces the complexity of monitoring groups of system. As you can see, F5 BigIP Local Traffic Manager automatically appears on the System Dashboard. This allows administrators managing Oracle and F5 technologies to have a single view of all of the alerts on their environment. Here you looked at how Groups functionality can be applied to F5 BigIP
Local Traffic Manager, just like to any other Enterprise Manager managed
target. Similarly, you can use familiar monitoring features, such as alerts,
notifications, blackouts, and templates for Local Traffic Manager monitoring.
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Grid Control's Service Level Management functionality provides a comprehensive monitoring solution that helps IT organizations achieve high availability, performance, and optimized service levels for their business services. Administrators can monitor services from the end-users' perspective using service tests or synthetic transactions, model relationships between services and underlying IT components, diagnose root cause of service failure, and report on achieved service levels. The System Monitoring Plug-in for BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager enables IT organizations running applications on top of Oracle and BIG-IP to derive greater value from Enterprise Manager's Service Level Management features in a number of ways:
Perform the following steps to perform Root Cause Analysis on BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager:
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Click the Group: Plug-ins link on the dashboard.
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Click the Services subtab.
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You will see a list of Services managed by Enterprise Manager. Let's look more closely at the Loan Application Service, which is down. Click the Loan Application Service link to navigate to its home page
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On the home page, you can immediately see the Root Cause of service failure. The service is down because one of the tests is down. Now let's look at the topology of this service. Click the Topology property page.
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As you can see, Loan Application Service is an aggregate service, consisting of multiple subservices. Here we also see all of the infrastructure components that individual subservices are relying on. In red, we see visual indication of the root cause of service failure.
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In the Overview section, use the zoom functionality and move the
view selector to the Credit History App, to see it more clearly.
By bringing plug-ins into Enterprise Manager, you can now perform comprehensive service modeling and view the entire service topology. In addition, you can identify or exclude plug-ins as a cause of service failure. In this case, F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is not the cause of service failure.
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In this lesson, you learned how to:
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View the Home Page | |
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Monitor Availability and Performance of Grid Control | |
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View BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager Reports | |
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Manage Configuration | |
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Apply Monitoring Features to BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager | |
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Enhance Service Modeling and Perform Comprehensive Root | |
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To ask a question about this OBE tutorial, post a query on the OBE Discussion Forum. |
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