CSS 11500 connections logging

[Dmitriy Zhiznevskiy]

Greetings.

How do I send syslog messages about ALL connections to the CSS, with information about which service the connection was assigned to?

Furthermore, this log would grow rapidly, and it shouldn't overwhelm the internal storage, at best it shouldn't be written there (but other log messages should).

The software version is 8.20.4.02.

[Daniel Arrondo Ostiz · Accepted solution]

Good morning Dmitriy,

Unfortunately, the CSS doesn't include the transaction logging feature. Probably the best approach would be getting this information from the servers themselves.

Regards

Daniel

[Dmitriy Zhiznevskiy]

Daniel, thank you for your reply.

One more question, probably offtopic. Does the ACE have this sort of functionality?

And I'd be grateful if you would point me to a table that compares the CSS and ACE. All I found was marketing materials with zero useful information. Guys from Cisco persuaded us to migrate to ACE, but also didn't say why ACE is better, apart from "CSS is EOL". I guess the ability to log all connections real-time could be the first major reason to buy ACE boxes (or cat6500 modules, which is more likely).

Thank you in advance.

[Daniel Arrondo Ostiz]

Hi Dmitriy,

Yes, the ACE has level-6 log messages for both connections established and torn down. Have a look at the link below for more details on them:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/partner/docs/interfaces_modules/services_modules/ace/vA2_3_0/configuration/system/message/guide/messags.html#wp1147852

Regarding the differences between ACE and CSS and the reasons to migrate, the people from your account team are probably best suited to answer why in your case a migration would be recommended, but, let me give you a couple of general comments.

For a start, saying that the CSS is EOL is not really accurate. It's still fully supported and bugs are still being fixed, but it's true that we will most likely not see any active development on it because the product is already very old. That by itself is a good reason to start thinking of migrating to ACE instead of growing the CSS setup.

The ACE is also bringing some improvements from CSS that can justify the migration:

• Higher throughput
• More advanced L7 processing features (header insertion, url parsing...)
• Virtualized setups by the use of contexts

Regards

Daniel

[Dmitriy Zhiznevskiy]

Once again, thank you.