In this HowTo, I will show you how you can get statistics off of the Netscaler without using SNMP. You might be asking why would I want to do that?? Well like many other devices that support SNMP, the Netscaler makes use of dynamic OID creation. For those of you that do not understand what I mean. Dynamic OID creation, is the way that Networking devices give OID's to variables that are not static in the device itself.

Here are some common static variables/OID's, amongst most devices out there.

• CPU Utilization
• Disk Utilization
• Memory Utilization
• TCP Statistics

Here are some common, non-static variables/OID's..

• A Load Balanced Virtual Server
• Statistics about LUNS
• Statistics about Services

Now you can get these statistics off of the SNMP based device. But if and when this device is rebooted, more then likely the OID has changed. Now you are stuck with the task, of finding the new OID. Since the Netscalers have a SOAP Based API, we can get those same statistics with out ever needing to know the OID.

Here I have attached a script that I wrote, using Python and Suds to connect to the Netscaler. This script works perfectly with Zenoss and its DataPoint structure.

Download Get Netscaler Stats

File Title: Get Netscaler Stats (Details) File Type: py File Version: 1.0.1 File Size: 10.00 Kb License: File Author: Allen Sanabria File HomePage: Downloads: 1 Rating:  ( Votes) Your Vote: ?12345

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Recently I just started to use the Citrix Netscalers again ( Load Balancers ). Being the person that I am, I wanted a way to grab the information using the SOAP API.
Now Citrix has a ton of documentation for Perl/C/C# and Java ( None for Python ). SOAP client support has not been the best for Python, in my opinion.
I know you have soappy/ZSI, which I have had issues with consuming Broken WSDL files ( Having to fix the Broken WSDL file manually, SUCKS!).

Just 2 weeks ago, I encounterd SUDS. This module is by far, the best SOAP client for Python.
There documentation is simple and straight to the point, with a bunch of nice samples to get you on your way.

Install SUDS before proceeding further. You can get suds from here. https://fedorahosted.org/suds/
Connection to my netscaler was as simple as this...

Python 2.4.3 (#1, Sep  3 2009, 15:37:37)
[GCC 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-46)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from suds.client import Client
>>> url = "http://nsip/api/NSConfig.wsdl"
>>> from suds.xsd.doctor import *
>>> imp = Import('http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/')
>>> imp.filter.add("urn:NSConfig")
>>> d = ImportDoctor(imp)
>>> client = Client(url, doctor=d, location="http://nsip/soap/")
>>> client.service.login(username="login", password="pass")
(simpleResult){
 rc = 0
 message = "Done"
 }
>>>

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I've been using Swatch for quite a while now and I never invested the time to  create a quick startup script. Today, I decided to create one and it works just fine under Centos and Ubuntu Server. You can download it here..

Download Swatch Startup Script

File Title: Swatch Startup Script (Details) File Type: sh File Version: 1.0 File Size: 1.37 Kb License: File Author: Allen Sanabria File HomePage: Downloads: 46 Rating:  ( Votes) Your Vote: ?12345

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For those of you who visit linuxdynasty everyday, you might have notice some subtle changes in the authorization aspect fo the site. I had to enable captch images in the login, and posting parts of the site. Since for the past few weeks, spammers have been hitting the comments and forums section. I'm hoping this does not annoy everyone, but the spamming is starting to really annoy me.

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It is official, I have begun development on the Web Server and Database for the Port Report Project and the Network Device Manager Project. I will be combining both scripts into a True Network Device Manager. My goal is to create an Open Source Network Device Manager that will give Admins and Engineers complete Insight/Access to their network. It does not matter if you want to know which switch your ESX host is directly connected to or if you want to manage all your Switches/Linux Hosts with this product. We have a few more ideas on what we want to do, but they are just ideas and I will not post them yet.

I will be using Python, Pexpect, PySnmp, SQLAlchemy, and Django for this project. I'm hoping to have an Alpha for users to test by late November or early December. If you are interested in this project, please give me ideas on what you would like to see in this Project. Currently we do not have an official name for the project.  If you have one, let me know as well. All ideas are welcome, as we are trying to make a complete enterprise product out of this project.

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