Cisco gNMI Telemetry Monitoring
Use This InfluxDB Integration for FreegRPC Network Management Interface (gNMI) is an interface for network management systems (NMS) to interact with a network device. gNMI provides the mechanism to install, manipulate, and delete the configuration of network devices, and also to view operational data. The content provided through gNMI can be modeled using YANG.
Why use the Cisco gNMI Telemetry Telegraf plugin?
If you are part of a network operations team, the ability to collect data in near real time is important for network visibility and performance. Many switches like the Nexus switches can stream telemetry data using gNMI, and the Cisco gNMI Telemetry Telegraf Plugin will allow you to consume this data in InfluxDB. Once in InfluxDB, you can visualize the data in InfluxDB, Grafana, or your own custom dashboards. Dashboards of this telemetry data will prove useful with your day-to-day operations, automation and planning of your network. In addition, if you have devices using other protocols like SNMP, you can gain a holistic view of all your network devices.
How to stream Cisco gNMI telemetry using the Telegraf plugin
Cisco gNMI Telemetry is an input plugin that consumes telemetry data based on the GNMI Subscribe method. TLS is supported for authentication and encryption. It has been optimized to support GNMI telemetry as produced by Cisco IOS XR (64-bit) version 6.5.1, Cisco NX-OS 9.3, Cisco IOS XE 16.12 and later.
In the Telegraf configuration - to set up the subscription of the GNMI telemetry data - you will need to define the server address, username, and password. You can also set up a redial setup in case of a failure. There are 2 detailed step-by-step instructions by Cisco and Network to Code that can help you with the full end-to-end setup.
- Hot off the press: Introducing OpenConfig Telemetry on NX-OS with gNMI and Telegraf written by Cisco Systems
- Monitor Your Network With gNMI, SNMP, and Grafana written by Network to Code
An excellent resource on this topic as well is Cisco's Data Center Telemetry and Network Automation Using gNMI and OpenConfig White Paper.
Key Cisco GNMI Telemetry metrics to use for monitoring
Some of the important Cisco GNMI Telemetry metrics that you should proactively monitor include:
- Traffic per uplink (bps)
- Traffic per instance (bps)
- BGP Session status
