Telemetrify

A YANG driven network telemetry collector.

One of the core design principles, if not the core design principle is that Telemetrify is YANG model driven. All data is conceptually YANG modelled. Non YANG data and transports are supported by mapping the data into a reverse mapped YANG model. Many good things emanate from this idea of only dealing with YANG modeled data. It enables data validation with complex constraints and data can be transformed by defining YANG to YANG model transforms. Without a common data modeling language, like YANG, defining such transforms quickly becomes an intractable problem.

The output format currently supported is to write to label centric TSDBs (Time Series Databases). The YANG modeled data is presented as time series on a TSDB proprietary transport. M3DB is the only supported TSDB for the time being.

Protocol support

Native YANG modeled transports

• NETCONF RPC polling
  • JUNOS exposes all operational state data using RPCs

Non native YANG transports

• Cisco SD-WAN vManage HTTP polling
  • HTTPS REST API
  • reverse mapped into YANG modelled data

Output formats

• TSDB
  • M3DB

Deployment

Currently the only way to run Telemetrify is as a package in Cisco NSO. NSO hosts the YANG schema used to configure Telemetrify itself as well as the YANG schema used to validate telemetry data from network devices. The Telemetrify configuration include things like connectivity parameters of devices and the subscription on those devices.

In the future, Telemetrify will also support running standalone, directly reading YANG models and exposing an interface for configuration.

Telemetrify as an NSO package (using container w/ NSO in Docker)

1. Install Acton
   • TLDR: ./actup for quick install locally in project
2. Build base NSO in Docker images, using NSO version in telemetrify-nso/nidvars.mk (currently 6.1.5)
   • git clone https://gitlab.com/nso-developer/nso-docker.git
   • place NSO installer in nso-docker/nso-installer-files
   • make -C nso-docker build-all tag-release-all
3. Build telemetrify-nso
   • make nso
4. Start the nso-tsdb test environment
   • cd tests/nso-tsdb
   • make start configure
5. Check out Grafana for pretty graphs
   • make show-address
6. TODO: describe how to configure etc

Telemetrify as an NSO package (without containers)

1. Install NSO whichever way you like
2. Compile the package(s) in telemetrify-nso/packages
   • telemetrify is required
3. Load telemetrify package in NSO
4. ...
5. profit!