CustomPollerDisco

Overview

The Unified Assurance Metric Custom Poller Discovery Agent uses rules to create metrics that will be polled from a device. This is accomplished by using the instance information that was previously gathered by other applications and entered into the Unified Assurance database.

For example, the default job and rules configuration will create the base metric entries for the following:

• Interface Inbound and Outbound Bandwidth, Errors and Discards metrics can be created depending on the Device Type and Instance Name. There are rules for the Device Types of Server, Switch and Router that are provided by default, and each Device Type has separate set of Instance Name requirements that are needed for metric creation to occur. Other Device Types will not be processed.

• Response Time metrics can be created depending on the Device Type and Instance Name. There are rules for the Device Types of Switch and Router that are provided by default, and both of those Device Types have separate sets of Instance Name requirements that are needed for metric creation to occur. All instances for the Device Type of Server will be processed. Other Device Types will not be processed.

• Ping Polling metrics can be created for all devices. There are no limitations done on Device Type in these rules, and the metrics will only be created on the Device instance, which is created by default for all devices.

Custom Poller Discovery Agent Setup

1. Devices must exist in the Device Catalog for this application to be able to function. Devices can be created in several different ways:

   1. Using the Device Auto Discovery application.

   2. Using the Manual Discovery UI:

      Configuration -> Device Discovery -> Manual Discovery

   3. Manually entering all values using the Devices UI:

      Configuration -> Device Catalog -> Devices

2. Optional - The bandwidth metric creation functionality requires that instances have been discovered using the Metric SNMP Network Interface Discovery Agent job (which uses the Metric SNMP Network Interface Discovery Agent application), or via another method.

3. Optional - The response time metric creation functionality requires that instances have been discovered using the Metric NMAP TCP Port Discovery job (which uses the Metric Pipe Instance Discovery application), or via another method.

4. Review the logic in the rules files referenced in the configuration to see the processing that will be done on the devices that are selected:

   • LoadRules will be run during application startup to load data that might be needed during processing.

   • IncludeRules will be read during application startup to load additional files that might be called during processing. In a default configuration, there are several rules files that are included so they can be called from the BaseRules.

   • BaseRules will be run for each device that is selected based on the configuration.

   Update the logic as needed.

5. Enable the default Job, unless a specific configuration option is needed.

   Configuration -> Broker Control -> Jobs

Default Scheduled Job

Default Configuration

Best Practices

• The default job configuration is to run every Sunday at 12:59:00am.

Rules

This connector uses the Unified Assurance standard rules architecture in Perl syntax. For information about creating rules, see the following in Unified Assurance Developer's Guide:

• Core for information about core rules functions.

• Metrics for information about metric rules functions.

• Application Logging

Tokens

The agent exposes the following tokens for rules processing.

$CustomHash->{SubObject} = &share({});

Example Enhancement

Adding Thresholds to Metrics

While the metrics are being created in the rules, various thresholds can also be added to the metrics automatically. Information regarding the default Thresholds that come with Unified Assurance is available via the Thresholds UI.

Configuration -> Metrics -> Thresholds -> Thresholds

Here is a snippet of the original code from the ping.include.rules that creates a latency metric:

    ($Error, $Message, $MetricID) = FindMetricID({
        DBH          => \$Assure1DBH, 
        StorageHash  => $MetricHash, 
        DeviceID     => $Instance->{'DeviceID'}, 
        InstanceID   => $Instance->{'InstanceID'}, 
        MetricTypeID => 60, 
        Factor       => 1, 
        Max          => 0, 
        PollInterval => $PollInterval, 
        Create       => 1
    });
    UpdateMethodOnMetric({
        DBH      => \$Assure1DBH, 
        MetricID => $MetricID, 
        MethodID => 0
    });

Here is the code that can be used after the code segment to add the thresholds:

    # Adds the "Device Down" threshold
    ($ErrorFlag, $Message) = AddThresholdToMetric({
        DBH         => \$Assure1DBH, 
        MetricID    => $MetricID, 
        ThresholdID => 1
    });

    # Adds the "Latency High" threshold
    ($ErrorFlag, $Message) = AddThresholdToMetric({
        DBH         => \$Assure1DBH, 
        MetricID    => $MetricID, 
        ThresholdID => 3
    });

Administration Details

The following list shows the technical details you will need for advanced administration of the application:

• Package - coreCollection-app

• Synopsis - ./CustomPollerDisco [OPTIONS]

• Options:

   -c, --AppConfigID N   Application Config ID (Service, Job, or Request ID)
   -d, --DeviceID N      DeviceID (Optional)
   -?, -h, --Help        Print usage and exit
  

• Threaded - Single Threaded