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Managing a Network with Cricket

Managing a Network with Cricket. Jeff Allen WebTV Networks, Inc. First things first…. It’s Cricket now!. The Problem. Monitoring a network is hard: Short-term issues make us act reactively Need data that we often don’t have to make good long-term decisions

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Managing a Network with Cricket

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  1. Managing a Network with Cricket Jeff Allen WebTV Networks, Inc.

  2. First things first… It’s Cricket now!

  3. The Problem Monitoring a network is hard: • Short-term issues make us act reactively • Need data that we often don’t have to make good long-term decisions • Lots of types of devices, operating at all levels of the protocol stack

  4. Common Questions: Short term: • Is the link to Europe up? Long term: • Do we need more bandwidth to Europe?

  5. Better Questions: • What is the current state of the link? • What has it been recently? • Is it what we expect it to be? • What long-term trends can we discern? Answering questions like these requires a good data collection and graphing system.

  6. The System: Cricket! Cricket is a tool for storing and viewing time-series data. • Very flexible • Extremely Legible Graphs • Space and Time efficient • Platform Independent

  7. How it works • Cricket’s collector runs from cron every 5 minutes and polls devices. • Data is stored in the RRD files. • Cricket’s grapher CGI script is used interactively to browse the data. Both the collector and the grapher rely on a hierarchical configuration system called a Config Tree.

  8. Collection Cricket gathers data from: • SNMP • Shell Scripts • Files • URL’s • Perl Procedures

  9. Storing Data Data lives in Round Robin Database (RRD) files. • Automatically discards old data, maintaining constant size database. • Automatically rolls-up data into summaries on various time scales. • Uses binary format on disk for speed.

  10. Graphing the Data • Graphing is actually done by RRD – thus the very close resemblance to MRTG graphs. • The graphs are useful because they have: • Enforced data density • Enough info to tell the whole story • The Right Scale

  11. The Config Tree Hierarchical structure for config files: • Uses inheritance to avoid repeated configuration info. • Easy to add new targets. • Easy to parallelize collector (and administrators). • Could be used by other apps in the future

  12. Future directions • The capacity to draw 4500 graphs hardly qualifies as a proactive monitoring tool. • Humans must check the graphs now. • Wouldn’t be nice if Cricket could check the graphs itself? How would a computer know if a graph “looks right”? • Cricket could send traps to an Alert Manager -- but that’s next year’s talk!

  13. Contact info: Where: http://www.munitions.com/~jra/cricket You can download it for free from here (under the GPL), and find out about the mailing lists related to Cricket. Who: Jeff Allen <jra@corp.webtv.net>

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