b p e r f

A performance data collector for Brocade Silkworm and HP B-Series switches


 

Overview

bperf is a shell script that calls gathers performance data for Brocade Silkworm or HP B-Series switches, then stores it in a RRD database. Performance data is then plotted and stored on a web server.

Consider this as beta software. It's been running fine for me for a while, but it may not be the best solution for you. Documentation is limited. If you already run cacti or cricket in your shop, you definetely won't want to use this! If you have any trouble installing this, drop me an e-mail.
 

Background

In 2006, I was looking for a way to plot graphs with performance data for my HP B-Series switches. The only official solution was to purchase an expensive piece of software that did more than I needed. Since I was looking for a reason to learn RRD Tool, I wrote my own in a few hours after reading the RRD Tool documentation. I also wrote this tool since I found cacti to be an overkill solution which would take too much time to implement.
 

Supported platforms

bperf has been developped and tested on HP-UX 11.23 only.
 

Requirements


 

Licence

bperf is released under a BSD license.
 

How it works

Directly from a startup script in /sbin/init.d, bperf starts as a background process. Each 30 seconds, it launches a bunch of children collectors; one for each switch defined in the configuration file. Each child has the job of polling all the ports on its own switch, and there is one RRD database for each switch/port combination. P

Collection is done as following:


Ports are pooled each 30 seconds. Polling must be done frequently as the counter is 32bit and it quickly gets wrapped; it cannot wrap twice or else the data is lost.
 

Download, install and run instructions

1. Grab a working copy of rrdtool. On HP-UX, you'll probably need to build it by yourself and it is beyond the scope of this webpage to explain this. The building instructions given by RRD Tool's author are easy to follow.

2. Install snmpget. You can get it easily from the Net-SNMP package on the HP-UX Internet Express DVD.

3. Download bperf here: bperf.tar.gz. It will untar in ./opt/bperf.

4. Open the file /opt/bperf/etc/bperf.cfg and configure it for your site.

5. Add a startup script in /sbin/init.d, along with a hook in /sbin/rc3.d, that starts bperf as following:
nohup nice -19 /opt/bperf/bin/bperf.sh /opt/bperf/etc/bperf.cfg collect >/dev/null 2> /var/adm/syslog/bperf.errorlog &
Note: For added security, the collectors can be run as another user than root.

6. Setup a few cron jobs like these to graph your data: 
00,05,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * nice -19 /opt/bperf/bin/bperf.sh /opt/bperf/etc/bperf.cfg graph daily-small >/dev/null
05 * * * *  nice -19 /opt/bperf/bin/bperf.sh /opt/bperf/etc/bperf.cfg graph daily >/dev/null
1 * * * *   nice -19 /opt/bperf/bin/bperf.sh /opt/bperf/etc/bperf.cfg graph weekly >/dev/null
2 21 * * *  nice -19 /opt/bperf/bin/bperf.sh /opt/bperf/etc/bperf.cfg graph monthly >/dev/null
3 21 * * 1  nice -19 /opt/bperf/bin/bperf.sh /opt/bperf/etc/bperf.cfg graph yearly >/dev/null
05 00 * * * nice -19 /opt/bperf/bin/bperf.sh /opt/bperf/etc/bperf.cfg archive >/dev/null

 

Olivier S. Masse


Page created: Jan 08 2008

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