Monitoring & Allocating Resources On ACE20-MOD-K9

[Dominic Wilkinson]

Hi,

We are currently running a ACE20 with 11 contexts. Recently we have seen that one of the contexts is being 'starved' of resources, especially Concurrent Connections, Bandwidth and Throughput.

Whilst we know how to address this situation by reallocating resources from less busy contexts, I was wondering if there was a more scientific way of looking at the resources being used and calculating the best way to allocate them across the ACE other than just looking at the 'show resource usage' and 'show resource allocated' commands?

Has Cisco or any other 3rd party developed a handy tool to monitor the the ACE resources which will possibly assist with calculating the optimum resource allocations across all contexts?

If there isn't a tool is there any formula which can be used?

Thanks,

Dom

[Borys Berlog]

Hi Dominic

Regarding tools - you can use ANM (http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6904/index.html). This is a management system for ACEs. It collects data   and provides central management and monitoring point for your ACE devices. So, you can see consolidated statistic and information for your deices in userfriednly GUI and make changes there too.

As a handmade solution - you can use available SNMP traps + e.g. write some script which will collect resource usage statistic for you.

I can't imagine some kind of system or formula which can decide how much resources you need to allocate to particular context. That is the same as in any network design project - based on expected load you need to estimate amount of resources you need.

Hope it helped.

[Dominic Wilkinson]

Hi Borys,

We already have ANM, but unfortunately like several Cisco monitoring products, it's not very reliable. Usually one or two clicks in the GUI and the whole thing hangs, so it's a bit of a white elephant for us!

I just wondered if there was any alternative.

We also use NAGIOS, so I may have a play around with that to get the stats in a more reliable fashion.

For the time being, I'm quite happy to do the calculations by hand to get the results that we require.

Thanks for your thoughts and suggestions.

Dom.

[Shobith K]

Best way to do this is to collect "show resource usage all" command output every 5 minutes, by means of any script and store and analyse this data.  This command gives you allocted, current and max values for various resources in ACE.  The parameter "Denies" & "Current" can be added and graphed with some excel knowledge.  This can provide you with exact data on the utilisation of the device and also if any bottlenecks.  Hope this helps.