Introducing Pipeline: A Model-Driven Telemetry Collection Service

The Other Half of the Story

With model-driven telemetry (MDT), routers can stream out large amounts of operational data in a highly efficient, easily consumable way. But getting data off the box is only half the story. You have to have something on the other end to collect and transform the raw data in preparation for storage and analysis. MDT uses standard transports, RPCs and encodings, so theoretically it wouldn’t be too hard to whip up your own collector using standard libraries and packages. Luckily, you don’t have to start from scratch. Last week, we open-sourced Pipeline, a lightweight collection service that provides the first step in scalable data collection.

Input, Transform, Output

Pipeline is a flexible, multi-function collection service that is written in Go. It can ingest telemetry data from any XR release starting from 6.0.1. Pipeline’s input stages support raw UDP and TCP, as well as gRPC dial-in and dial-out capability. For encoding, Pipeline can consume JSON, compact GPB and self-describing GPB. On the output side, Pipeline can write the telemetry data to a text file as a JSON object, push the data to a Kafka bus and/or format it for consumption by open source stacks. Pipeline can easily be extended to include other output stages and we encourage contributions from anyone who wants to get involved.

What It’s Not

It’s important to understand that Pipeline is not a complete big data analytics stack. Think of it as the first layer in a scalable, modular, analytics architecture. Depending on your use case, that architecture would also include separate components for big data storage, stream processing, analysis, alerting and visualization.

Big data platforms in open source include (among many) PNDA, the Prometheus eco-system and the InfluxDB stack. Pipeline’s function is to process the raw telemetry data from the network and transform it into a format that can be leveraged by powerful systems like these.

Try It Today!

If you’re ready to unleash the power of model-driven telemetry, head on over to github and check out the Pipeline repo.  And if you need some help getting started with MDT, be sure to check out our tutorials.  It’s time to discover what big data analytics can do for your network.