Telemetry for Cisco

Introduction

The repo helps for the deployment of a monitoring system including telegraf, influxdb and chronograf. This has been thought for telemetry with Cisco devices and tested with Cisco NX-OS devices. If you would like to use it with a different type of devices, or different protocols such as SNMP, just configure the appropriate telegraf plugin (check configure telegraf part). Also, if you prefer Grafana over Chronograf or anything else, edit the docker-compose file to use the GUI of your choice.
If you are new to telemetry, have a look at the following documentation. This article also gives a code snipped example.
https://developer.cisco.com/docs/nx-os/#!telemetry/streaming-telemetry
I would also encourage to have a read at the following documentation explaining it from the IOS-XR point of view :
https://xrdocs.io/telemetry/tutorials/2016-07-21-configuring-model-driven-telemetry-mdt/

Also, it should be noted telemetry is not specific to NX-OS or Cisco, therefore Telegraf Influx Chronograf (TIC) stack can be used with any vendors.

Requirements

All you need to have is docker installed. Also, make sure you have connectivity between the containers and the devices streaming data. This example use gRPC port 57000.

Install

Have a look at docker-compose.yml file, edit the ports or the volumes mappings if needed.

Launch the containers :

docker-compose up -d

Configure database

Connect into the influxdb container, and create admin user, database and database user. This has to be done only once, as repository is mapped on the host.

docker exec -it monitoring_influxdb_1 /bin/bash

root@b34fa9a249d4:/# influx
Connected to http://localhost:8086 version 1.7.7
InfluxDB shell version: 1.7.7
> CREATE USER admin WITH PASSWORD 'PASSWORD' WITH ALL PRIVILEGES
> auth
username: admin
password: 
> CREATE DATABASE DATABASE_NAME
> CREATE USER USERNAME WITH PASSWORD 'PASSWORD'
> GRANT ALL ON "USERNAME" TO "PASSWORD"

Configure telegraf

Edit telegraf.conf with the following lines. Please note the input plugin is specific for telemetry, use a different input plugin if needed. The output plugin should be generic.

[[outputs.influxdb]]
  urls = ["http://influxdb:8086"]
  database = "DATABASE"
  username = "USERNAME"
  password = "PASSWORD"

[[inputs.cisco_telemetry_mdt]]
  transport = "grpc"
  service_address = ":57000"

Configure chronograf

Connect on chronograf web interface, go to configuration and configure the admin credentials so chronograf can authenticate to influxdb. Configure the dashboard and enjoy!