Installation of Sub-Metadata Aggregator Function Server

This section provides information about:

■   What is Sub-Metadata Aggregator Function Server
■   Installing SMAF Server
■   Installation of Sub-Metadata Aggregator Function Server
■   Debugging SMAF server as systemd

What is Sub-Metadata Aggregator Function Server

Sub-Metadata Aggregator Function Server (SMAF) is responsible for collecting the Transaction Event Records and Application Intelligence Flow Records  from various GTP-c or Application Metadata Intelligence(AMI) Nodes in the network environment. The collected records are correlated and the related information are merged together to form a final Subscriber Aware Metadata , which is sent to the customer data collection centers. More design and functional behaviors can be found at: Sub-Metadata Aggregator Function Server.

Installing SMAF Server

There are various ways to run the SMAF server, the two common methods used are:

■   Running as Systemd Process
■   Running as binary application

Prerequisites

The prerequisites required for the installation are:

■   Storage: 25GB
■   Memory: 4GB RAM
■   NIC: 1 Interface with 2 Ports
■   SFTP Connectivity
■   Storage: Minimum 100GB
■   Memory: 16GB RAM
■   2 NIC Interfaces
■   High Speed SFTP Server Connectivity
■   Redis DB for Persistence
■   Requiring dedicated 100GB memory

Installing as Systemd Process

You can install SMAF server using script

The default installation is Installation using Script.

SMAF Installation Scripts

Step 1) Copy the latest built from the server to your linux machine.

Step 2) Run the script as sudo user.

Validating the installation

To validate the installation, you should check:

■   Check for directories created
■   Check for users
■   Check for default configuration and creation of configuration template
Copy 
am@Interlaken ~> ls -lrt /usr/share/gigamon/smaf/aggregator/
total 24
drwxr-xr-x 3 inverness inverness 4096 Nov 22 18:36 ami/
drwxr-xr-x 2 inverness inverness 4096 Nov 23 05:05 bin/
drwxr-xr-x 2 inverness inverness 4096 Nov 26 13:54 log/
drwxr-xr-x 2 inverness inverness 4096 Nov 26 13:55 purged/
drwxr-xr-x 2 inverness inverness 4096 Nov 26 13:55 files/
drwxr-xr-x 2 inverness inverness 4096 Nov 26 16:07 conf/
am@Interlaken ~>
Copy 
am@Interlaken ~> id -u inverness
1005
am@Interlaken ~>
Copy 
am@Interlaken ~> ls -lrt /usr/share/gigamon/smaf/aggregator/conf/
total 8
-rw-r--r-- 1 inverness inverness  82 Nov 23 05:05 aggregator-flags
-rw-r--r-- 1 inverness inverness 929 Nov 26 13:54 config.yaml
-rw-r--r-- 1 inverness inverness   0 Nov 27 17:41 config_template.yaml
am@Interlaken ~>
Copy 
am@Interlaken ~> systemctl status smaf-aggre.service
● smaf-aggre.service - Gigamon SMAF Aggregator Beta v0.9.8 (#0147029)
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/smaf-aggre.service; disabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: inactive (dead)
     Docs: https://www.gigamon.com
am@Interlaken ~ [3]>

Running SMAF Server

The SMAF server runs either a

■   Prerequisites
■   Running SMAF Server as Systemd Service
■   Running as Binary

Prerequisites

The GTP listening interface requires MTU size as 9000.Hence, change the MTU size to 9000.

As GTP module sends records of size > 1500 bytes to SMAF, the change of MTU is required until fragmentation support is available in SMAF.

ifconfig <eth port> mtu 9000

To synchronize the clock in the following, you must configure the NTP client on the SMAF server to use the same NTP server used by the GigaVUE H-series device.:

■   SMAF server,
■   GigaSMART GTP
■   GigaSMART Application Intelligence engines

For NTP synchronization, do the following:

1. Install NTP

yum install -y ntp

2. Edit NTP configuration and use appropriate NTP server.

vi /etc/ntp.conf

server 10.1.1.1 iburst

3. Enable and validate NTP

# systemctl start ntpd.service

# systemctl enable ntpd.service

# systemctl status ntpd.service

# ntp

To open the TCP and UDP ports for the ports to use inSMAF servers , do the following:

Copy 
firewall-cmd --add-port=7001/tcp --permanent
firewall-cmd --add-port=8489/tcp --permanent
firewall-cmd --add-port=7001/udp --permanent
firewall-cmd --add-port=8489/udp --permanent
firewall-cmd --reload

Here the value for AMI is considered as 7001 and 8489 for GTP.

If the SMAF server runs using persistence feature, install redis-server

Redis Quick Start

Running SMAF Server as Systemd Service

After installation, follow these steps to run:

Do all the configuration for SMAF server in

/usr/share/gigamon/smaf/aggregator/conf/config.yaml

Copy 
am@Interlaken ~ [3]> sudo vi /usr/share/gigamon/smaf/aggregator/conf/config.yaml
# SMAF configuration
syslog:
  address: 10.210.30.186:9000
  num_handlers: 1
  queue_size: 2048
  handler: ami

Use systemd commands to start the server

am@Interlaken:~$ sudo systemctl start smaf-aggre.service

 

To stop the SMAF, use following command:

sudo systemctl stop smaf-aggre.service

For other commands, refer to Systemd Cheatsheets

Running as Binary

Take the binary from systemd installation or development environment and run using the following command

am@Interlaken:/usr/share/gigamon/smaf/aggregator/bin$ sudo ./smaf-aggre  --config ../conf/config.yaml

 

Debugging SMAF server as systemd

The following common systemd logs can be used for the debugging purpose:

■   Journalctl Logs
■   SMAF Log
■   Installation of Sub-Metadata Aggregator Function Server

Following logs

journalctl -u smaf-aggre.service -f

Checking errored logs

journalctl -xe

journalctl -xefu smaf-aggre.service

Other commands in journalctl

Refer to: Journalctl Cheatsheet

SMAF Log

The logs are saved and rotated as per the configuration in the config.yaml file:

Copy 
logging:
  level: debug
  console: true
  file: /usr/share/gigamon/smaf/aggregator/log/log/
  file_size: 10mb
  encoder: development
Copy 
am@Interlaken:~$ ls -lrt /usr/share/gigamon/smaf/aggregator/log/
total 1044
-rw-r--r-- 1 inverness inverness    986 Nov 23 05:05 log.2020-11-23T05:05:29Z.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 inverness inverness   6176 Nov 23 07:17 log.2020-11-23T07:17:30Z.gz

.