Two challenges that
network providers usually face are data gathering and data analysis. Network
providers need to gather large volumes of data to analyze the performance of
the network and to have operational control over their network. Large service
providers are strengthening their data gathering and analysis infrastructure.
Traditionally, Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) agents are used to
expose management data on managed systems. But, SNMP is not well suited for
gathering large volumes of data, especially over short time intervals.
For example, service
providers charge customers depending on the network usage. Also this data must
be available on customer request. Accounting applications based on SNMP polling
models consume significant network bandwidth because they poll large volumes of
data frequently. The SNMP protocol data unit (PDU) is a complex data type
specific to SNMP and is expensive to process because the SNMP objects and
tables must be sorted in a lexicographic order. All the entries in SNMP MIB
tables are lexicographically ordered by their object identifiers, because there
is an implied ordering in the MIB based on the order of the object identifiers.
In such cases, the
need to continuously poll large or bulk SNMP statistics can be avoided by using
applications known as collectors to retrieve data.
The Bulkstat
application is one such collector that uses the services of the Data Collection
Manager (DCM) to provide the following functions:
-
Collecting SNMP
MIB object values and the output of
show
commands.
-
Processing the
collected data to create summary, percentiles, and auto-baselined values.
-
Exporting
collected data through simple file transfer.
-
Scheduling
calendar events for data collection and export.
The Bulkstat
application provides command-line access through a set of new configuration
commands and exclusive MIB access through CISCO-DATA-COLLECTION-MIB to collect
SNMP data.
You can configure
Bulkstat for the following functions:
-
Specify the way
Bulkstat retrieves bulk statistics.
-
Specify the time
interval in seconds at which Bulkstat transfers data to receivers.
-
Specify the
maximum size of the bulk statistics file.
-
Specify the
context, instance, and period at which the system retrieves bulk statistics.
-
Configure
file-related parameters.
-
Configure the
interface type on which you want to collect statistics.
-
View the
parameters that Bulkstat uses to collect statistics by using the
show bulkstat
commands.