Nagios Plugin to Check Extreme Networks Devices

Over at INEX we’ve embarked on a forklift upgrade of the primary peering LAN using Extreme Networks Summit x670’s and x460’s. As usual, we need to monitor these 24/7 and we have just written a new Extreme Networks chassis monitoring script which should work with most Extreme devices.

It will check and generate alerts on the following items:

  • a warning if the device was recently rebooted;
  • a warning / critical if any found temperature sensors are in a non-normal state;
  • a warning / critical if any found fans are in a non-normal state;
  • a warning / critical if any found PSUs are in a non-normal state (or missing);
  • a warning / critical if the 5 sec CPU utilisation is above set thresholds;
  • a warning / critical if the memory utilisation is above set thresholds.

You’ll find the script in this Github repository: barryo/nagios-plugins.

A some verbose output follows:

./check_chassis_extreme.php -c  -h 10.11.12.13 -v 
 
CPU: 5sec - 4% 
Last reboot: 4007.7666666667 minutes ago 
Uptime: 2.8 days. 
PSU: 1 - presentOK (Serial: 1429W-xxxxx; Source: ac) 
PSU: 2 - presentOK (Serial: 1429W-xxxxx; Source: ac) 
Fan: 101 - OK (4388 RPM) 
Fan: 102 - OK (9273 RPM) 
Fan: 103 - OK (4428 RPM) 
Fan: 104 - OK (9273 RPM) 
Fan: 105 - OK (4551 RPM) 
Fan: 106 - OK (9452 RPM) 
Temp: 39'C 
Over temp alert: NO 
Memory used in slot 1: 29% 
OK - CPU: 5sec - 4%. Uptime: 2.8 days.  PSUs: 1 - presentOK; 
  2 - presentOK;. Overall system power state: redundant power 
  available. Fans: [101 - OK (4388 RPM)]; [102 - OK (9273 RPM)];
  [103 - OK (4428 RPM)]; [104 - OK (9273 RPM)]; [105 - OK (4551 
  RPM)]; [106 - OK (9452 RPM)];. Temp: 39'C. 
  Memory (slot:usage%): 1:29%.

Querying Cisco MST Port Roles via SNMP with OSS_SNMP

OSS_SNMP is a PHP SNMP library written by myself for people who hate SNMP. After a customer migration from PVST to MST (Multiple Spanning Tree), I have added a number of MST functions / MIBs to OSS_SNMP:

During a fairly significant network migration involving breaking / connecting a number of links, I wanted to be able to monitor the MST port role of significant ports at a glance. For this purpose, I wrote the mst-port-roles.php script and have committed it as an example to OSS_SNMP. First, here is what it looks like when run on the command line (with hostnames obfuscated):

MST Port RolesFrom a very simple array of port details at the top of the script, it will poll all switches and for each port print:

  • device and port name;
  • port state and speed;
  • port role for each applicable MST instance.

I run it on bash and use bash colouring. The script is well documented and can easily be repurposed for other networks. You’ll find the source here.

Translating SNMP OIDs Using MIB Files

I get caught trying to remember this a lot and there’s a really useful tutorial on this at the Net-SNMP website: Using and loading MIBS.

If you’re using Ubuntu, also consider checking the comments in /etc/snmp/snmp.conf which (in 13.04) contains:

As the snmp packages come without MIB files due to license reasons, loading of MIBs is disabled by default. If you added the MIBs you can reenable loading them by commenting out the following line.

Also, run the following:

apt-get install snmp-mibs-downloader

which will download some basic MIBs as part of the installation.

NOCtools and OSS_SNMP Get Support for Multiple Spanning Tree (MST) Protocol

NOCtools (a mixed bag collection of tools and utilities for NOC engineers) and OSS_SNMP (a PHP SNMP Library for People Who HATE SNMP, MIBs and OIDs) have just gotten support for Multiple Spanning Tree.

Specifically, OSS_SNMP has two new MIBS (Cisco’s original MST tree which has a lot of deprecated nodes – MIBS\Cisco\MST; and the newer IEEE tree – MIBS\Cisco\SMST). With these, we can, for example, get an array of [instanceID] => instanceName values from a switch by just coding:

$ciscosw = new \OSS_SNMP\SNMP( $ip, $community );
print_r( $ciscosw->useCisco_SMST()->instances() );

NOCtools has the more impressive use cases of these new features. Specifically (and just likes its RSTP/pvrspt functionality), it can:

  • Show MST port roles (root, designated, alternate, etc) for a given (or all) MST instance(s) – this is equivalent to the RSTP version;
  • From a given device, it can crawl all CDP neighbours and create a graph of all devices, their connecting ports and the MST roles of those ports. This is a really useful feature as it means you don’t need to log into multiple switches to get a handle on what links are blocking. See documentation and a sample diagram here.

Monitoring Asterisk via SNMP (with OSS_SNMP)

Over on the company blog, we just announced that we committed a complete Asterisk MIB implementation to OSS_SNMP in addition to a proof of concept Asterisk wallboard to NOCtools which includes active channels, uptime, version information and more.

Full details are on the company post but here’s a snippet of how easy it is to query Asterisk over SNMP:

 $host = new \OSS_SNMP\SNMP( $asteriskIP, $community );
 echo "Asterisk version: " . $host->useAsterisk()->version();
 echo "Active calls: " . $host->useAsterisk()->callsActive();
 echo "Calls processed: " . $host->useAsterisk()->callsProcessed();

And here’s a screenshot of the proof of concept Asterisk wallboard:

[NOCtools Asterisk Wallboard]
NOCtools – Asterisk Wallboard