NS1 and VMWare NSX Advanced Load Balancer make it easy to enable high-velocity global load balancing and performance-based traffic management across your multi-cloud infrastructure. The integration allows you to push rich metrics from your virtual services (NSX ALB) to NS1 where the data is combined with telemetry, like RUM, in order to optimize the end-user experience, uptime, and security. Supported metrics include up/down status as well as custom metrics—including load, active connections, and requests per second. Additionally, you can configure more advanced L4-7 metrics like error counts and Client RTT. These metrics are pushed to the edge of NS1’s Managed DNS platforms in near real-time where they are used to inform traffic routing decisions for each and every query.
Customers utilizing the Avi Metrics Query API via the avi-metrics container can select NS1 as an endpoint. Periodically, the API performs a health check against the virtual service to determine up/down status, number of active connections, and number of requests per second, and pushes this information back to NS1 as a data feed.
For basic up/down monitoring, users create a data feed within the NS1 platform, and then inject a Python script containing a unique NS1 API key and data source ID into Avi Vantage where they can set parameters to trigger an alert to NS1 whenever a virtual service goes up or down.
For custom metrics ingestion, a Docker container runs alongside each instance of an Avi controller within each of your data centers or PoPs. Users can set parameters as to how often the container pushes custom metrics from the Avi load balancers to the NS1 servers . NS1 ingests this data and, based on the user-defined low and high watermarks, distributes traffic intelligently across all data centers in your infrastructure to avoid overloading any single PoP.] Note: For a complete list of custom metrics that can configured, refer to this list.
For example, if your load balancers can safely handle up to 10,000 requests per second (RPS) before performance degrades, you can use the Avi Metrics Script to send RPS metrics to NS1. You can then configure a low watermark (ex. 8,000) and high watermark (ex. 10,000) for your data center.
If a load balancer reports that it has reached 8,000 requests per second (low watermark), NS1 gracefully and automatically starts to de-prioritize the endpoint, instead responding to the query with the next best answer using other filters — such as geo-targeting or Pulsar’s latency-based routing. If RPS metrics indicate that the high watermark is reached, NS1 completely stops sending new users to that PoP until the load balancer indicates the workload has returned to acceptable levels.
Refer to this GitHub tutorial for installation instructions or contact your NS1 sales representative to schedule a demo.