Hi All

Recently I attended a Juniper workshop in their London office and heard about Junos Telemetry concept which was really a new one for me and I quite liked it.

The basic idea is to replace traditional methods of collecting the data from devices on Management stations which helps Operations teams in more automated solution for managing their vast networks.

Traditional method which I am talking about here is SNMP which works on Pull model where Management station polls the network devices to gather useful information using MIBs and in turn displays the data to Network Admins/Operations Team. This method is being used currently and have succeed a lot. However as Hardware vendors are providing more and more APIs in their products which can be used by users to configure their devices in lots of innovative ways, polling or gather statistics via SNMP is not scalable in those scenario. Also SNMP polls the devices at regular interval which is again an operational challenge as something can happen on device between the intervals which wont be captured.

Junos Telemetry or Telemetry concept in general provides a Push model where we can configure the device to send the real time data based upon any trigger or in general for various parameters. 

  Source: Juniper Networks

In this blog, we are not going to see how its configured in CLI but who knows when I can get hold of appropriate Junos code and have a play on it 🙂 but till then let’s see what are its other features.

Junos Telemetry interface (JIT) as I mentioned above works on Push model where it streams the results to collector or even to Controller like Northstar to drive MPLS LSPs. Format of data what is being sent is either in form of Google Protocol buffer GPB or can be JSON based.

Juniper provides the collector software however there are open source collectors as well called OpenNTI collector which is basically a docker container consisting of 3 open-source components.

• FluentD (data collection, http://www.fluentd.org/)
• InfluxDB (database, https://influxdata.com/)
• Grafana (visualization, http://grafana.org/)

Shown below is one of the Visualization chart using Grafana,

From application point of view, i think its one of the application could be to re-route the LSPs or create a LSP from Northstar Controller based upon the bandwidth statistics from interface. Once interface statistics reported to collector exceeds certain threshholds, Application can instruct Northstar controller to create a LSP via other route which can in long term works towards Self Driving Networks.

Other Application could be to provide more user-friendly stats about routers/network device to Operations like Memory, CPU usage in environment where thousands of routes or control packets are going via routers and memory hog can be created because of this.

Junos Telemetry Interface was introduced in Junos OS Release 15.1F3, on MX Series routers with interfaces configured on MPC1 through MPC6E, and on PTX Series routers with interfaces configured on FPC3.

So that’s all for Telemetry. I haven’t added much details on this as this is really a new concept for me and as n when I read more about it or get a chance to do hand-on on it, I will write more. Let me know your views on it and if you have used or planning to use this in your network.

Regards

Mohit