Monitoring VPN servers

Enabling metrics monitoring

To receive monitoring metrics, you must set up your IBM Cloud Monitoring instance.

To receive monitoring metrics, use the following steps:

1. Navigate to the metrics monitoring portal and click Create a monitoring instance.

2. Select a region for your IBM Cloud Monitoring instance.

   If you do not have an existing VPN server, see Creating a VPN server to provision one.

   The region needs to match the location of your existing VPN server.

3. Choose your pricing plan. Pricing plan details are explained in the selection window. Select the plan that best meets your requirements.

4. Provide a unique service name for your instance. The name can be any name that you want and has no impact on functionality.

   Do not give multiple IBM Cloud Monitoring instances the same name.

5. Optionally, select a resource group. A resource group organizes account resources in customizable groupings. Any account resource that is managed by using IBM Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) access control belongs to a resource group within your account.

   If you do not have any pre-configured resource groups, or have no reason to share this resource selectively, use the default selection.

   If your account has multiple resource groups, you can choose which group has access to this IBM Cloud Monitoring instance. By using this selective access, metrics can be available to some resource groups and not to others.

6. Check the Enable Platform Metrics checkbox. You must select this option to receive metrics from your VPN server.

7. Click Create. You are taken back to the monitoring metrics home page.

Within a few minutes, your new IBM Cloud Monitoring instance displays with several configurations. You might have to refresh your browser to see it.

Working with IBM Cloud Monitoring by using APIs

You can also work with the IBM Cloud Monitoring instance by using metric query APIs. You might want to use APIs if you need raw data points or want to consume your metrics from a command-line interface rather than using the IBM Cloud Monitoring dashboard.

After you create your IBM Cloud Monitoring instance, you must collect the following two pieces of information.

• The Monitor API token
• The endpoint of your IBM Cloud Monitoring instance

To collect this information and work with your IBM Cloud Monitoring instance by using metric query API, follow these steps:

1. Access the Monitoring home page.

2. Click Open Dashboard next to the instance that you want to work with.

3. After you see the IBM Cloud Monitoring dashboard, select your Account Profile icon on the sidebar and select Settings. You now see your account settings.

4. Your Monitor API token is an alphanumeric string that is located in the Sysdig Monitor API Token field. Click the Copy button to copy the token to your clipboard.

   Do not share this API token. Anyone who has this API token has full access to your metrics.

5. The endpoint of your IBM Cloud Monitoring instance is per region. For example, if your IBM Cloud Monitoring instance exists in us-south, then its endpoint is:

   https://us-south.monitoring.cloud.ibm.com/api/data/batch
   

   The first part of the URL (in this example, us-south.monitoring.cloud.ibm.com) is your endpoint. Make note of this URL.

6. After you have both the API token and the endpoint, you can format your POST request. The following POST request is an example, with all the parameters that you can modify. The following are parameters:

   • The Monitor API token.
   • The endpoint of your IBM Cloud Monitoring instance.
   • The value for ibm_is_vpn_server_name (the VPN server name that you want to see metrics for).

   If you want to see this metric for all of your VPN servers, do not enter a value for the scope attribute. For example, use "scope" : "".

   • The metric type that you want to see the results for. This example uses ibm_is_vpn_server_health_status.
   • The from and to attributes define the timeframe to focus the scan, set in epoch time, and in microseconds.
   • The sampling and value attributes set the granularity of the data that is returned in the POST request.

Because a large volume of data is stored in IBM Cloud Monitoring, choosing the specific level of granularity is important. IBM Cloud Monitoring can return only 600 data points at a time per request. As a result, the sampling and value attributes are important. Leaving these two lines out of your request returns an aggregate sum over that time period instead.

If the time range that is specified by from and to is large (for example, 4 days), but you define a sampling and value of 10 seconds, it means that you receive 4 days worth of data that is split into 10-second chunks. This sample is not useful because of the large amount of data that is returned. Specifying a larger chunk is recommended (for example, 1 hour instead of 10 seconds).

   curl \
   -H 'Authorization: Bearer <API_TOKEN>’ \
   -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
   https://us-south.monitoring.cloud.ibm.com/api/data/batch  \
   -d '{
     "requests": [
         {
             "format": {
                 "type": "data"
             },
             "scope": "ibm_is_vpn_server_name = \"test-001\"",
             "metrics": {
                 "k0": "timestamp",
                 "v1": "ibm_is_vpn_server_health_status"
             },
             "time": {
                 "from": 1624849800000000,
                 "to": 1624850400000000,
                 "sampling": 60000000
             },
             "group": {
                 "by": [
                     {
                        "metric": "k0",
                         "value" : 60000000
                     }
                 ],
                 "aggregations": {
                     "v1": "avg"
                 },
                 "groupAggregations": {
                     "v1": "avg"
                 }
             }
         }
     ]
 }'