Hello everyone,

I'm going to set up a weathermap with all our cisco switches (interfaces status only)
For simple switches (I mean 1U switches manageable) it seems ok (not tested yet but all I read from people on this forum is pretty clear).

My question is : how can I deal with complex switches like Cisco N5K ?

If I "snmpwalk" one of these, my indexes are like :


And of course, some of them are part of one N2K (FEX 167) and others are part of an other N2K (FEX 170)


How can I create such a switch node with my 2 FEX (in fact there are more than 2 FEX per N5K - it's just for the example) ?
Anyone tried it ?

Thanks for your help.

I don't think this a weathermap question.

But... have you tried it? This is how all chassis or stack based Cisco switches have always worked - With chassis/module/port names. Cacti doesn't care about the indexes being sequential. e.g. on a 3750 stack the ports go from 10101 to 10124 then 10601 to 10624 on the second unit, which is effectively what a FEX would look like. Same for a 6509 with multiple cards.

Unfortunately, not tested yet.

I'm not afraid Cacti will handle this easily

My question is how will I be able to generate such chassis in a weathermap...I mean I have several N5K with several FEX each - some have 16 ports, some have 48, how can I script such thing ?
If I need to create port node and swich node by hand it will take me very long (about 500 ports per N5K). Or maybe I didn't understand something (it's possible too ^^).

Other thing, since my only need is having port status I was thinking about avoiding cacti pull (no graph needed) like pulling manually and storing result in mysql table.
But as far as I know, Weathermap only works with cacti graphs or direct SNMP OID.

So what is the best in my case ?

Learn a scripting language. Or excel. You can make excel generate Weathermap config.

E.g: you know the ports are in a grid, and you want 2 rows of 24 ports each. You can calculate the position of each node (port) on the map, relative to the first port:



Now you have a grid of nodes which will all move when you move sw1_p1. Excel or any scripting language will make this type of node generation easy.

In the random-bits folder of the weathermap directory, there is a script called cacti-integrate.php. It takes a map config file, and tries to find matching cacti datasources based on the interface names/aliases. It also fills in all the overlibgraph entries, if it can.

So you also need to define some SET variables for each node, so cacti-integrate can work:


(you can also set cacti_id to the actual database ID for the device in cacti. If you use the hostname, it must match the one in the cacti database)

Then for each link, you can specify the name of at least one of the interfaces it connects to:


With that info, cacti-integrate can find the right datasource, and will fill in the TARGET, INFOURL, OVERLIBGRAPH ans BANDWIDTH for you.

If you make good use of TEMPLATE, you can save a lot of repetition for formatting the nodes, too.

Maybe I need to look at the cacti-integrate.php script you're talking about.
Thank you for the relative port position (I saw that we could set position of all ports node in a switch node but I didn't know we could set a port node position based on an other one)

I know a little bit about perl (made some devs for my customers) and bash scripting so it's not a dev issue.

I think I'm just confused about how to generate it.
For example FEX 110 has 16 ports, FEX 120 has 48 ports, FEX 130 has 24 ports.
The thing is I want to generate a weathermap for my N5K without knowing how many FEX and how many port per FEX.

When adding my N5K to cacti, it will discover all interfaces.
But will it able to order it by FEX (and if yes - based on what ?).
With a script to generate my weathermap config file how will I be able to generate the good number of interfaces for each FEX of my N5K. (maybe cacti-integraphe.php can help me since it will match cacti datasources based on interfaces names)

No, cacti-integrate will not help you add the nodes. It only looks for data for existing nodes.

I don't really see the problem with constructing this in groups of ports (main switch, then fex 1 then fex 2). Unless you forgot to mention that you have 15000 of these units.

I think you are assuming that Cacti and Weathermap are both much smarter than they are. Cacti will just read all the interfaces and add them - SNMP doesn't care what metal box they are in. Weathermap just turns numbers into colours - it doesn't care what the numbers mean.

It was late yesterday for me, sorry if I said weird things...

I read cacti-integrate.php to understand what it does so I'm ok with it.

What is not easy for me now is that I'm talking about Cacti & Weathermap as memories (I used them couple years ago - as you can see I don't post often but I'm registered since...2006 ^^).
I don't have a server right now but I'm going to install it in few days so I try to imagine how I will use it...so you can understand it's not easy for me

So if I use Cacti, the Cisco template will generate all relevant informations about me devices' ports (as far as I remember).
When I'm going to create my weathermap config file, I will write a perl script to generate all ports for my Cisco N5K (6 devices with 500 ports each)
Let's say first card has 2 ports, second has 16 ports, third has 48 ports, fourth as 16 ports.

So I want my script to create an image with 4 cards (or FEX). The first one will have only 2 ports (with color red/green), the second will have 16...
I guess I need to use an image with 48 ports for all cards an only fill 2 ports on first, 16 on second....right ?

How my script will know that first card has two ports ? What is the information in Cacti that help me to make the difference between my cards (the Interface Name / Descr ? How will my script gather this information).

Other possibility - in my case no graph is needed (only UP/DOWN ports), so I was thinking about not using Cacti.
I mean, I can gather all ports states and description in a simple MySQL table and then generate my weathermap config file (in this case I know how to easily parse interface name so I know how many card I have). Don't you think it would be better ?

And...I don't agree with you - Cacti and Wearthermap are so smart !!! So far I didn't find any competitor which could stand in front of weathermap...

I would use an image for a *port*, and an empty rectangle for the chassis. That way you can avoid this whole issue

You just have port-up.png, port-down.png, port-error.png etc.

To automatically find the number of ports on each card, you might find something in OLD-CISCO-CHASSIS-MIB to help, perhaps? There are a few different cisco mibs for hardware inventory.

If you want to go the non-Cacti route, I'd try the 'tabfile' datasource in Weathermap, which is just a tab-separated text file with 3 columns: node/link name, 'in' value, 'out' value. As soon as the next version is out, it will support SNMPv2c and v3 polling directly (it only does v1 currently). You'll be on your own with mapping out those ifIndex numbers again then, though.

That's what I meant when I said "I guess I need to use an image with 48 ports for all cards an only fill 2 ports on first, 16 on second....right ?".

But if I use a MySQL to store all my devices' informations, my script will easily find how many ports there are on each fex so it can choose the right switch image

I don't like using MIBs, the idea is to create something as generic as possible to work with several customers (but I'm OK with the idea)

What is the 'tabfile' you're talking about ? (I didn't see any topic on it)

N.B : Thank you for taking the time to answer my (sometimes stupid) questions - I really appreciate (and sorry for my english)

Yes, tabfile. It's in the manual:

http://network-weathermap.com/manual/0. ... .html#tabs

I don't really understand your proposal for the devices though - how does your data get into mysql if not from SNMP?

And then you would need to write a data source plugin for weathermap to read the mysql database.

My idea is a script gathering all informations I need through SNMP.
Everything is stored in my table.
Then an other script read the table to generate my config file (which will contain no datasource but only images - my ports NODES will be ICON put on my switch NODES - static images) and weathermap create the final image.

Am I wrong ?

Thank you for the tabfile link !

OK, that makes sense. Before, it seemed like you didn't want to use SNMP

Yes, that would work. I would write it as one script and skip the database, personally, but it doesn't make much difference.

Good luck!

Yes ! I'm not so foolish

Thank you for your time (and - but you already know it - for your great job that helps us all !).

Hello,

It's been a while but thanks to your help I finally made it.
Now all my datacenter is under control.

I attach a Cisco Nexus we use for example.

Thanks again !