What Can seafelt Performance Manager Monitor?

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Yesterday we discussed the components of seafelt Performance Manager, and how it monitors things. Today I’d like to show you the things that SPM can monitor out of the box, and give you a taste of how SPM can be extended to monitor pretty much anything.

Element Type Templates

SPM configuration is done using XML. I’ll leave the details of how the XML definitions work for another post, but for now, have a look in the template directory for your SPM installation, which is usually found here:

/usr/var/seafelt/template

We want to look specifically at files with a prefix of elemtype. Each of these files defines an SPM Element Type, so we can see the following Element Types are defined:

• elemtype-bgp: BGP router instances
• elemtype-cpu: CPUs
• elemtype-fibrechannel: FibreChannel interfaces
• elemtype-framerelay: Frame Relay interfaces
• elemtype-host: An abstract idea of a Device, used for monitoring statistics on Devices that support the HOST-RESOURCES-MIB
• elemtype-interface: Network interfaces, Ethernet ones for the most part.
• elemtype-linecard: Linecards inside larger switch/routers, such as the Cisco 65xx series.
• elemtype-loadaverage: 5, 10 and 15 minute load averages for devices that support the UCD-SNMP-MIB (mostly Unix servers of various flavours)
• elemtype-nagios-plugin: A generic Element Type to support the Nagios plugin API
• elemtype-netapp-snapmirror: NetApp storage appliance SnapMirror relationships
• elemtype-netapp-snapvault: NetApp storage appliance SnapVault relationships
• elemtype-netapp-vfiler: NetApp MultiStore virtual Filer instances
• elemtype-printer: Printer support
• elemtype-route: Support for collecting route table information from devices. Used as attributes rather than for polling statistics
• elemtype-storage: Storage devices of many kinds, including memory and disk
• elemtype-subprocess: Support for monitoring via arbitrary commands
• elemtype-tcp-generic: Support for monitoring arbitrary TCP services
• elemtype-tokenring: Tokenring interfaces
• elemtype-vrf: Virtual Routing and Forwarding tables on Cisco switch/routers

As you can see, the base level seafelt Performance Manager is able to monitor a wide range of devices and elements.

Adding New Elemtypes

Extending SPM to monitor new Element Types is as simple as adding an XML definition for the new Element Type. This can be quite simple indeed, or it can become quite complex if you want to support a variety of Elemvars that may not be present on all devices, use conditional discovery parameters, and other more advanced features.

In a future post, I’ll run through an example of adding a new Element Type definition, but for now, have a look at the existing definitions to get familiar with how things work. Some of the simpler definitions are the loadaverage and printer Elemtypes.

Got questions? See an Element Type you wish was covered, but isn’t? Let me know in the comments!