Kentik now supports SNMP collection of the CPU and Memory utilization for F5 BIG-IP devices. Some of the F5 BIG-IP devices do not support flow export features, which means that the collection of the SNMP metrics would require use of Kentik's kproxy with the “bootstrap_devices” option.

The general behavior of the Kentik’s SaaS ingest or Kentik’s Kproxy is that the SNMP metrics collection would only start once the flows are received from the certain device. This behavior can be limiting in some cases and can be changed by the use of the Kproxy’s Bootstrap devices feature. This feature is enable with the use of the-bootstrap_devices command line argument. This argument should provide the comma-separated list of devices’ IDs. For those devices, the Kproxy will start the SNMP metrics collection immediately, without waiting to receive devices’ flows. More information about the Kproxy CLI arguments can be found in our Knowledge Base article: https://kb.kentik.com/v0/Bd04.htm#Bd04-kproxy_CLI_Reference

The Kentik’s Kproxy will determine that the discovered device is F5 BIG-IP by looking for the “big-ip” string in the well-known SNMP sysDescr OID.

The Kproxy would monitor the following 4 Device “Components”, with the use of the SNMP OIDs described below:

• Name “Global”:
  • MemoryTotal [bytes] - OID Name: sysGlobalHostMemTotal, OID: .1.3.6.1.4.1.3375.2.1.1.2.20.2.0
  • MemoryUsed [bytes] - OID Name: sysGlobalHostMemUsed, OID: .1.3.6.1.4.1.3375.2.1.1.2.20.3.0
  • CPU [percentage] - OID Name: sysGlobalHostCpuUsageRatio5m, OID: .1.3.6.1.4.1.3375.2.1.1.2.20.37.0
• Name “TMM”:
  • MemoryTotal [bytes]- OID Name: sysStatMemoryTotal, OID: .1.3.6.1.4.1.3375.2.1.1.2.1.44.0
  • MemoryUsed [bytes] - OID Name: sysStatMemoryUsed, OID: .1.3.6.1.4.1.3375.2.1.1.2.1.45.0
  • CPU - value will be 0
• Name “Other”:
  • MemoryTotal [bytes] - OID Name: sysGlobalHostOtherMemoryTotal, OID: .1.3.6.1.4.1.3375.2.1.1.2.20.44.0
  • MemoryUsed [bytes] - OID Name: sysGlobalHostOtherMemoryUsed, OID: .1.3.6.1.4.1.3375.2.1.1.2.20.45.0
  • CPU - value will be 0
• Name “Swap”:
  • MemoryTotal [bytes]- OID Name: sysGlobalHostSwapTotal, OID: .1.3.6.1.4.1.3375.2.1.1.2.20.46.0
  • MemoryUsed [bytes] - OID Name: sysGlobalHostSwapUsed, OID: .1.3.6.1.4.1.3375.2.1.1.2.20.47.0
  • CPU - value will be 0

For each component  MemoryFree and MemoryUtilization are calculated from collected MemoryTotal and MemoryUsed metrics. Each component use standard Uptime which is collected at the device level from sysUpTime OID.

The support is available in kproxy starting from version v7.36.0. The example of the Data Explorer query is shown below: