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Use an Application's API to collect performance metrics instead of OIDs

daleharrisonips

Hello,

I'm more of a networking and snmp kind of guy but I have an application (QRadar) that I want to monitor that is running on a linux host.

I usually like to find the services and ideally specific application performance metrics exposed either through WMI or SNMP OIDs and start collecting them via Solarwinds NPM/SAM to be able to show historical/trend graphs of specific KPI's for the application or our usage of the application. I chose using Solarwinds rather than the application itself, because I can standardize the capacity-planning/trend reports across all of the applications/services being monitored for a consistent look and feel.

Now to my conundrum. IBM QRadar has opted to forgo using SNMP for anything but the basic Net-SNMP usage and so has no OIDs for any of their internal performance metrics. They've decided instead to utilize only their REST/JSON API for anyone to query their application.  I have been able to stay blissfully away from major programming languages for the last couple of decades and now find myself having to learn how to use JSON and REST to interrogate the QRadar API and collect my performance counters I need.

Then I need to figure out how in Solarwinds to run these interrogations and extract these metrics to store in the database to use for my reports in the same way I use my WMI and SNMP performance collections.

I thought some of you fine, outstanding young minds might be able to provide some insight or a quick example into how best to accomplish this in Solarwinds.  I've already watched a couple hours worth of API programming basics videos on Youtube and now delving into the QRadar API SDK to determine exactly the calls and parameters to utilize, but again, I'm never opposed to seeing what any one recommends is the best way to "crash course" these programming languages.

Cheers,

Dale

  • 0

    Sucks that you are on the networking side rather than server admin because my go to solution to this would be via powershell.  You can use whatever scripting engine you like really but the end result is you would need to set up custom script monitors to query this api for the values you need. 

    This post gives a break down on how to interact with script monitors

    SAM Script Component Monitors - Everything you need to know

    This one is focused on python

    Using a Python script as a SAM component

  • 0 in reply to mesverrum

    Well, I've been reading your linked content and lots of others over the last week, and have started to successfully do some queries only to discover that the metrics that I'm trying to pull out of the system doesn't appear to have been made accessible via their API either. emoticons_laugh.png

    The PowerShell and Python scripts are what I've been working with and have been relatively easy to pick up on the logic of writing code/scripts.

    Thanks for the refs in your reply, they came in very handy.

    Now to see what else I can coerce out of this API to make this learning effort beneficial for something productive at lease.

    Cheers,

    Dale.

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