Using NAE Agents

Interpreting an Agent's Behavior

Before going into specific script examples, let's walk through what an agent, the running instance of a script, looks like, and how to interpret its output.

Using the System Resource Monitor script as an example, this walkthrough will highlight the different components of an agent. The System Resource Monitor is the only script installed on the system by default.

What the script monitors

This script monitors CPU and Memory utilization. It observes all the processes executing on the switch and calculates how much of each resource, as a percentage, each process is consuming/holding.
The script monitors short, medium, and long-term usage. It uses those intervals of time (in minutes) to calculate the average resource usage over the duration of said intervals.

What an alert indicates

When the average CPU or Memory utilization exceeds a preset threshold for the specified short period of time, a Minor alert is issued and the agent will log all system daemons' CPU and Memory utilization information, along with CoPP statistics.
If the average CPU or Memory utilization exceeds the threshold for the specified medium period of time, a Major alert will be raised.
If the same happens for a specified long period of time, a Critical alert will be flagged.

Reading the Graph

An NAE graph visually represents the data collected from the monitored resources.
At the top, there are viewing options on the left side:
Time viewing options include the Live view or pre-set time periods ranging from the past one hour to the past one year. Additionally, there is a custom view that can be activated by clicking-and-dragging the cursor to highlight the timeline.
Configure chart and Options: In the "Configure Chart" view, you can customize which monitors and their tracked values are displayed on the graph. "Options" allows the exporting of the graph data as a picture (in .png form) or as a spreadsheet (in .csv form).

The ledger at the bottom of the graph lists all the agent's monitors. These can be hovered over and clicked on by the cursor. Hovering over a monitor will highlight that monitor's line on the graph. Clicking on a monitor will toggle between making the monitor's name grey and causing its line to disappear from the graph, or making the monitor's name bold and causing its line to reappear on the graph.

Modifying the Agent's Paramenters

The basic approach an operator can take to modify an agent's behavior is editing the agent, or changing its parameters' values.

Changing parameter values is straightforward. Each parameter has a description listed. If the parameter has a default value, that will also be mentioned. If the parameter's value is left blank, the default value will be used.