PMDACISCO(1)

NAME
pmdacisco - Cisco router performance metrics domain agent (PMDA)

SYNOPSIS
$PCP_PMDAS_DIR/cisco/pmdacisco [-D debug] [-d domain] [-l logfile] [-U username] [-P password] [-r refresh] [-s prompt] [-M username] [-x port] host:interface-spec [...]
$PCP_PMDAS_DIR/cisco/parse [options] host:interface-spec [...]
$PCP_PMDAS_DIR/cisco/probe [-D debug] [-P password] [-s prompt] [-U username] [-x port] host

DESCRIPTION
pmdacisco is a Performance Metrics Domain Agent (PMDA) which extracts performance metrics from one or more Cisco routers.

A brief description of the pmdacisco command line options follows:

-d  It is absolutely crucial that the performance metrics domain number specified here is unique and consistent. That is, domain should be different for every PMDA on the one host, and the same domain number should be used for the same PMDA on all hosts.

-l  Location of the log file. By default, a log file named cisco.log is written in the current directory of pmcd(1) when pmdacisco is started, i.e. $PCP_LOG_DIR/pmcd. If the log file cannot be created or is not writable, output is written to the standard error instead.

-P  By default, it is assumed that no user-level password is required to access the Cisco's telnet port. If user-level passwords have been enabled on the Ciscos, then those passwords must be specified to pmdacisco. If specified with the -P option, password will be used as the default user-level password for all Ciscos. See also the INTERFACE IDENTIFICATION section below.

-r  pmdacisco will refresh the current values for all performance metrics by contacting each Cisco router once every refresh seconds. The default refresh is 120 seconds.

-s  The Cisco command prompt ends with the string prompt. The default value is ``>''. The only way pmdacisco can synchronize the sending of commands and the parsing of output is by recognizing prompt as a unique string that comes at the end of all output, i.e. as the command prompt when waiting for the next command.

-U  By default, it is assumed that no username login is required to access the Cisco's telnet port. If username login has been enabled on the Ciscos, then the corresponding usernames must be specified to pmdacisco. If specified with the -U option, username will be used as the default username login for all Ciscos. See also the INTERFACE IDENTIFICATION section below.

-M  User account under which to run the agent. The default is the unprivileged "pcp" account in current versions of PCP, but in older versions the superuser account ("root") was used by default.

-x  Connect to the Cisco via TCP port number port rather than the default 23 for a telnet connection.

For each interface, once the telnet connection is established, pmdacisco is willing to wait up to 5 seconds for the Cisco to provide a new snapshot of the requested information. If this does not happen, the telnet connection is broken and no values are returned. This prevents pmdacisco tying up the Cisco's telnet ports waiting indefinitely when the response from the router is not what is expected, e.g. if the format of the ``show int'' output changes, or the command is in error because an interface is no longer configured on the router.

INTERFACE IDENTIFICATION
As each Cisco router can support multiple network interfaces and/or multiple communications protocols, it is necessary to tell pmdacisco which interfaces are to be monitored.

The host:interface-spec arguments on the command line define a particular interface on a particular Cisco router. host should be a hostname or a ``dot-notation'' IP address that identifies the telnet port of a particular Cisco router. There are several components of the interface-spec as follows.

protocol
    One of the abbreviations a, B, E, e, f, G, h, s or Vl respectively for ATM, BRI (ISDN), FastEthernet, Ethernet, FDDI, GigabitEthernet, HSSI, serial or Vlan.

interface
    Depending on the model of the Cisco, this will either be an integer, e.g. s0, or an integer followed by a slash (``/'') followed by a subinterface identification in one of a variety of syntactic forms, e.g. e1/0, G0/0/1 or s4/2.1.

    To discover the valid interfaces on a particular Cisco, connect to the telnet port (using telnet(1)) and enter the command "show int" and look for the interface identifiers following the keywords ``Ethernet'', ``Fddi'', ``Serial'', etc.

    Alternatively run the probe command.

username
    If there is a username login, and it is different to the default (see -U above), it may be optionally specified here by appending ``@'' and the username to the end of interface-spec.

password
    If there is a user-level password, and it is different to the default (see -P above), it may be optionally specified here by appending a question mark (``?'') and the password to the end of interface-spec.

prompt
    If the Cisco command prompt is different to the default (see -s above), it may be optionally specified here by appending an exclamation mark (``!'') and the prompt to the end of interface-spec.

The following are examples of valid interface-spec arguments.
my-router:e1/2
123.456.789.0:s0
wancisco:f2/3?trust_me
somecisco:G1/0!myprompt
cisco34.foo.bar.com:e2?way2cool
mycisco:s2/2.1@mylogin
yourcisco:E0/0@yourlogin?yourpassword
mycisco:E0/0@mylogin?mypassword!myprompt

HELPER UTILITIES
The probe command may be used to discover the names of all interfaces for a particular Cisco router identified by host. The -P argument is the same as for pmdacisco.

The parse command takes exactly the same arguments as pmdacisco, but executes outside the control of any pmcd(1) and so may be used to diagnose problems with handling a particular Cisco router and/or one of its interfaces.

Additional diagnostic verbosity may be produced using the -D appl0,appl1,appl2 command line option. appl0 logs connect and disconnect events, login progress, high-level flow of control and extracted statistics. appl1 traces all commands sent to the Cisco device. appl2 logs tokenising and parsing of the output from the Cisco device. Diagnostics are generated on standard error as each sample is fetched and parsed.

INSTALLATION
If you want access to the names, help text and values for the Cisco performance metrics, do the following as root:

# cd $PCP_PMDAS_DIR/cisco
# ./Install

If you want to undo the installation, do the following as root:

# cd $PCP_PMDAS_DIR/cisco
# ./Remove

pmdacisco is launched by pmcd(1) and should never be executed directly. The Install and Remove scripts notify pmcd(1) when the agent is installed or removed.

FILES
$PCP_PMCDCONF_PATH
    command line options used to launch pmdacisco
$PCP_PMDAS_DIR/cisco/help
    default help text file for the Cisco metrics
$PCP_PMDAS_DIR/cisco/Install
    installation script for the pmdacisco agent
$PCP_PMDAS_DIR/cisco/Remove
    undo installation script for the pmdacisco agent
$PCP_LOG_DIR/pmcd/cisco.log
    default log file for error messages and other information from pmdacisco

PCP ENVIRONMENT
Environment variables with the prefix PCP_ are used to parameterize the file and directory names used by PCP. On each installation, the file /etc/pcp.conf contains the local values for these variables. The $PCP_CONF variable may be used to specify an alternative configuration file, as described in pcp.conf(5).

DEBUGGING OPTIONS
The -D or --debug option enables the output of additional diagnostics on stderr to help triage problems, although the information is sometimes cryptic and primarily intended to provide guidance for developers rather end-users. debug is a comma separated list of debugging options; use pmdbg(1) with the -l option to obtain a list of the available debugging options and their meaning.

Debugging options specific to pmdacisco are as follows:
Option | Description
appl0 | initialization, worker process details, data refresh, timeouts
appl1 | requests sent to Cisco device
appl2 | lexical scanner and parser for output from Cisco device

SEE ALSO
pmcd(1), pcp.conf(5) and pcp.env(5).