Tutorial: gNMIc - an intuitive gNMI CLI and a feature-rich telemetry collector

The need to reliably monitor today’s ever-growing networks in the WAN, edge, and data center domains is now more critical than ever. The industry relies largely on SNMP to monitor present networks, a protocol that falls short when used to monitor large networks let alone the increasingly complex networks of the future.

Openconfig's gRPC-based streaming telemetry protocol, gNMI is considered by many to be the prime successor to SNMP. It packs features to build modern monitoring stacks, such as a push-based telemetry model, reliable transport, default TLS security, data model-based access to monitored data leaves, and exceptional performance on the wire.

This tutorial introduces gNMIc, an open-source software suite which blends together a feature-rich gNMI CLI client and a performant, highly-available telemetry collector. Focusing on gNMI-based streaming telemetry, gNMIc sets itself apart from other general-purpose collectors with unique features including high availability and clustering of collector instances, rich data processing pipelines, sheer support for various outputs for metrics, and embedded caching, to name a few.

By the end of this session, participants will understand how gNMIc can be used to configure network devices, and building a modern open-source telemetry stack comprised of a collector, time-series DB, and visualization layer.

Karim Radhouani