NAME
YATG - Fast SNMP data poller daemon, with storage and graphing
VERSION
This document refers to version 1.0302 of YATG
DESCRIPTION
YATG is an application which is intended to be run persistently. At intervals it will wake up and poll network devices for SNMP data, and then store or print that data. In this distribution are also included examples for presenting simple CGI web pages with graphs.
Please understand that YATG is probably not going to be a plug-and-play system for you. We took the decision to generalize the code as much as possible, and release it, in the hope that other network systems administrators might find our solutions to these problems interesting, and maybe provide feedback.
However, YATG is flexible and powerful. It can poll a large number of devices with thousands of ports in just a few seconds. The configuration is very simple, and the defaults sane (it's designed for sysadmins, after all).
You can use YATG both for historical logging, such as traffic counters on ports, as well as short-term monitoring which might feed into, say, Nagios. Wherever possible, data is translated to human-friendly formats for storage, such as using Leaf Names instead of OIDs, translated values (up, down, etc) and device port names rather than SNMP Interface Indexes.
One final thing; YATG works well for us, but might not for you. We know that the code is rough in places. Take this distribution as a proof of concept, and please send patches, comments and suggestions to the email address below.
How Does It Work?
At startup, yatg_updater loads its configuration from local files and a database, performs some basic SNMP connections to build a cache about device capabilities and so on, and then goes to sleep.
Periodically, as determined by the configuration, yatg_updater wakes up and polls all devices, then stores results, again according to instructions in the configuration.
If you have only the essential dependencies installed (see below) then you can only output results to STDOUT. With other modules, you have more options such as local or remote disk, or memcached based storage.
yatg_updater will re-load all its configuration if given a HUP signal. If you run the daemon persistently (for example with daemontools) then a cron job once a day is a good way to refresh the configuration. There is reference to this in one of the bundled example files.
What's in this distribution
yatg_updater-
This is the main application, designed to be run persistently. It does not accept any input and only produces output when in debugging mode. It is a smart wrapper for the SNMP::Effective module.
- YATG::Store family of modules
-
These are modules which take the SNMP poll results and store them to either local Disk, a Memcached server, or the disk on a remote networked server.
- YATG::Retrieve family of modules
-
These are modules which read stored results back to you, for a given time window. The data can be retrieved from local Disk, a Memcached server, or the disk on a remote networked server.
- RPC::Serialized handlers
-
If storing and/or retrieving on a remote networked server, it should run an instance of RPC::Serialized, and these are the RPC Handlers for that server (see that module's documentation for further details).
- CGI
-
For the special case of viewing graphs of disk-based poll results for switch port traffic counters, there is are two CGI scripts. One is a wrapper which presents an HTML page embedded with PNG images created from the other script.
- Examples
-
The
examples/folder includes a copy of each of the files you should need for a complete deployment of YATG. Obviously some of them contain dummy data.
Where to go from here
To begin with, you probably want to see how to configure yatg_updater in YATG::Config.
Alongside that, there are examples of all the files you should need to install, in the examples/ folder of this distribution.
LOGGING and TESTING
This module uses "Log::Dispatch::Syslog" for logging, and by default will log timing data to your system's syslog service. More information is provided in the YATG::Config documentation.
To run in debug mode, where timing data is output to standard out rather than syslog, set the environment variable YATG_DEBUG to a true value.
To run the poller just once, set the YATG_SINGLE_RUN environment variable to a true value. This is great for development. It makes yatg_updater load its configuration, generate the device hints cache, sleep and then run just one poll cycle before exiting.
For example:
YATG_DEBUG=1 YATG_SINGLE_RUN=1 /usr/bin/yatg_updater /etc/yatg.ymlDEPENDENCIES
The following modules are dependencies of the YATG system, in addition to the standard contents of the Perl distribution itself:
- Class::Data::Inheritable
- DBI
- Log::Dispatch::Syslog
- Module::MultiConf
- Net::Netmask
- Readonly
- Regexp::Common
- SNMP
- SNMP::Effective (but not version 1.0)
- Time::HiRes
The following modules are optional, and allow you to use additional bundled features such as data storage, graphing, and so on:
SEE ALSO
- SNMP::Effective
-
This system uses SNMP::Effective at its core do the polling.
- RPC::Serialized
-
Store polled data on another server using RPC::Serialized.
AUTHOR
Oliver Gorwits <oliver.gorwits@oucs.ox.ac.uk>
COPYRIGHT & LICENSE
Copyright (c) The University of Oxford 2007. All Rights Reserved.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of version 2 of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA