The long time reader of this blog know I developed with @StanZhelyazkov a SCOM management pack for Kemp devices. For those who don’t know what Kemp does here are more info. As far as I know this is still the only MP for Kemp.
I tried to do it again, but this time with OMS Log Analytics. Starting from the great Linux Agent extensibility story I took my time time learn Ruby (thanks to pluralsight courses https://www.pluralsight.com/) and then created the solution.
I learned a lot in this process and I will follow up with more articles on OMS Linux Agent extensibility dos and donts, but today I just want to let you know where I am in the development, where you can find the preview version and what to expect from the future. I’m publishing today because in the next few weeks I won’t have much spare time so I have to shelve the project, probably until 2017.
In the meantime it would be great to get some feedback to improve the solution and make it ready for General Availability.
what the solution does
The solution uses the Kemp REST API to get all the information needed from the devices, it ingests them into Log Analytics in the form of logs and native performance data points. Optionally it can ingest syslog streams from the devices as well and parse them in a way they can be kept distinct from the other syslog entries in your OMS workspace.
The solution can help you answer these questions and many more:
- which are my device versions?
- when are my license and support plan going to expire? Obviously you can get an alert
- are my devices approaching their TPS limit? (the TPS is the capacity indicator for Kemp devices)
- how are my devices performing in terms of CPU or memory
- are my Virtual Servers running? and my Real servers?
It uses a Linux system onboarded to OMS as a proxy system to query the devices, you just need to integrate the agent with the provided modules and configure the solution with the address of the devices.
The solution provides a template (an ARM template) to deploy the preconfigured custom solution into your own OMS workspace. It should be really easy.
where can I find the solution
You can refer to the github project page where you can file bugs and requests.
In the GIT repo you can find the instructions to install and I’m going to keep the documentation up to date there.
what’s next
The solution needs some polishing, hopefully the ARM schema for Log Analytics will improve and I will leverage it for a more streamlined experience and a better update story. Same goes for the solution itself in OMS, let’s hope to have mor freedom inside the designer and the ability to build perspectives.
I need to implement better error handling in the fluentd plugins and check if the date set is ok or must be enriched, I’m sure I will need to more data.
Quae Nocent Docent 