Re: [hobbit] Monitoring hosts behind a load balancer

[Ralph Mitchell <ralphmitchell (at) gmail.com>]

I used to have some scripts that would make SOAP requests to an F5 to get
the pools and pool member status.  I no longer have access to that system,
but I may have a backup at home.

I based my scripts on a bunch of example programs in the F5 SDK.  IIRC, I
altered a couple of the perl scripts to output lines like:

     pool1 server1 OK
     pool1 server2 DOWN
     etc...

Then you just run around a loop reading the lines and sending BB status
messages.

As long as your F5 is checking the servers occasionally, this approach works
OK.

Ralph Mitchell


On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 12:07 PM, Steve Holmes <sholmes42 (at) mac.com> wrote:

> Greetings, I'm monitoring several Solaris 10 servers which are behind an F5
> load balancer. One of the features of the F5 is that it answers pings for
> all of the hosts behind it, even if they are all down. Has anyone devised a
> method of testing the servers for being alive in this context? There are no
> other network based tests being done. Yes, all of the other tests eventually
> go purple in Xymon, but we'd like to know that the hosts are down when that
> happens.
>
> Thanks,
> Steve Holmes
> ITaP/Purdue University
>
>