Netscaler | LinuxDynasty

HowTo monitor the Netscaler using Python and Soap instead of SNMP

Feb 072010

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

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How to get information from the Netscaler using Python and Suds.

Netscaler, Python, Zenoss No Responses »

Feb 012010

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 linux2Type "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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