Re: Tail-F

[Peter teStrake <Peter.teStrake () tradingscreen com>]

Conor,
Tail-f will give you a global view of your network configurations, and will keep the local database in sync with the 
devices.   This gives you the ability to search and update config across devices.

If you want to see the live status, then you can compile an snmp mib and attach that to the device, so your team can 
see both config and status via a single CLI.

Really though, it's about service provisioning and orchestration across multiple vendors, but there can be a fair 
amount of work there depending on what you are trying to achieve.

There is a also a REST interface that makes it pretty simple to access anything in the database and present it in a web 
page.

Cheers
Pete


Sent from my iPhone

> On 2 Nov 2014, at 23:58, Colton Conor <colton.conor () gmail com> wrote:
>
> I am aware that you can see if a port is up or down through SNMP. I guess
> that was a bad example. I want to see the entire output of a show interface
> command. For example, we have multiple types of access networks (GPON, DSL,
> Cisco ethernet switches). Some of the show interface commands are fairly
> basic, but others like on a DSL port show much more information like sync
> rate, signal loss, etc. The only way to get this information on some
> platforms is to run the show interface command for CLI I believe, or login
> to the access platform's GUI interface. Both of these task aren't so easy
> when you are dealing with multiple access platforms.
>
>
> > On Sun, Nov 2, 2014 at 3:15 PM, Phil Bedard <bedard.phil () gmail com> wrote:
> >
> > Tail-F's ConfD can operate as a front-end CLI and do the things he wants
> > it to do in an operational sense but I would agree it may not be the
> > easiest to use tool for simply monitoring and grabbing interface
> > state/statistics.   It's fairly flexible and can do a lot of abstracted
> > things through its ConfD element but there is some backend work to make it
> > happen.   Not as much as doing it from scratch but still a bit of work.
> > It can abstract different device CLIs so they all look the same and use the
> > same commands and you can extend the CLI to do custom things as well if you
> > want.
> >
> > The whole system is fairly powerful and very extensibe.  There are
> > monitoring elements built into it and It could be a full blown monitoring
> > system, really just depends on the scale you need and how much work you
> > want to put into it.
> >
> > Phil
> >
> >
> >
> > > On Sun, Nov 2, 2014 at 1:19 PM, Jimmy Hess <mysidia () gmail com> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Sun, Nov 2, 2014 at 11:04 AM, Colton Conor <colton.conor () gmail com>
> > > wrote:
> > > > Is anyone using Tail-f software or know anything similar? We are looking
> > > > for a solution that is vendor agnostic. Can do simple command like show
> > >
> > > I've only read of this, but my understanding is the Tail-F product is
> > > for configuration management and supporting provisioning automations
> > > anyways,  monitoring configs sure.  As far as I know they cannot
> > > monitor or show network operational status, so your use case may not
> > > overlap with their capabilities,  and perhaps, what you are likely
> > > suggesting is something that unfortunately doesn't exist yet:  a tool
> > > for both configuring and observing a detailed operational state of the
> > > network devices  in a vendor-agnostic way.
> > >
> > > However, for simple bandwidth statistics and port Up/Down;  for most
> > > devices, this  information is available through SNMP based management
> > > tools.
> > >
> > > Basic Up/Down and statistics  could generally be gathered by any good
> > > SNMP-based NMS / network monitoring product,  there are thousands of
> > > these, or OSS such as Cacti, Zenoss,  and proprietary ones such as  HP
> > > OpenView, SolarWinds, InterMapper, Whatsup;  also,  just about every
> > > major network device vendor has their element management system.
> > >
> > > Various NMS can also be configured to run some selected code or offer
> > > up a GUI command for running a snmpwalk  against the ifOperStatus or
> > > ifIn/Out Octets.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > > interface so even non-network techs and CSR's can get basic is the port
> > > up
> > > > or down type stats without having to directly login to the network.
> > > --
> > > -JH