F5 iControl vs F5 Big-IP (SNMP)

dragoon231

Hello all,

        Is there an article that gets into why you would want to setup iControl in NPM instead of just clicking it in 'list resources' and polling it by SNMP?  I see plenty of stuff saying it uses F5's API, but what does that really mean?  I need something to explain to the guy over F5 and management why it is worth him going through the hassle of account setup, etc. for Orion to access it.  Thank you!

xtraspecialj

Yep, here you go:

Set up Network Insight for F5 BIG-IP load balancers - SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. Help and Support

It breaks down what data it gets from SNMP and iControl.  Now, one thing that giving Orion iControl access does is allow Orion to rotate members in/out of pools.  This may scare some F5 admins.  There are two methods to handle this:

- If you don't wish to take advantage of the add/remove members to/from pools feature that Orion now offers on your F5's, just give Orion an iControl account that has read rights only instead of the admin account it asks for.

- Or, you can show him that while, yes, the iControl account that Orion has will allow it to rotate pool members on the F5's, that doesn't mean that it will do that unless you actually setup Orion to do so. 

     It also doesn't mean that every user that uses your Orion web console will automatically have access to perform these actions through Orion.  Hopefully you've got your user accounts in Orion setup by AD User Groups and not individual accounts, but regardless just go into the "Manage Accounts" screen in the settings of your Orion Web Console and make sure that only the groups/users that should be allowed to perform this action have "Node Management" rights, as that is what determines whether an individual user can rotate pool members in the web console.