nanog mailing list archives
Re: Starlink terminal data acquisition for network engineers
From: Tim Nelson <tnelson () sangoma com>
Date: Sun, 7 Feb 2021 16:45:22 -0600
Thanks Eric, this is great information. I just installed my Starlink "dishymcdishface" this weekend and it's humming along nicely, even in the -25F (-51F with windchill) temps here in northern MN! I've got a bunch of general monitoring of the link using a few Docker + grafana widgets [1], but hadn't looked into direct metrics gathering from the terminal yet. This will surely get me on that path :) --Tim [1] https://hub.docker.com/r/qlustor/speedtest_ookla-to-influxdb Tim Nelson Network Engineer / Cloud Services Phone: (218)727-4332 x4501 / Fax: (866)716-0229 5019 Airport Road, Hermantown, MN 55811 Check us out at www.sangoma.com On Sat, Feb 6, 2021 at 4:06 AM Eric Kuhnke <eric.kuhnke () gmail com> wrote:
I thought about posting this to only NANOG, but since a great concentration of beta testers of a technical/network engineering inclination are located in the Pacific NW, decided to also include the SIX chat list. You may have seen the Starlink android or ios consumer-friendly app, which displays network traffic, uptime/downtime, and other link stats. I believe this to be polled directly from the antenna unit itself over grpc. The beta antennas are always 192.168.100.1. If you are using your own router with the starlink beta system, in addition to its WAN interface being an ordinary DHCP client in cgnat IP space, you'll need to manually give it an address in that /24 and set up routing to reach the .1 IP as needed. reference: https://github.com/sparky8512/starlink-grpc-tools reference: https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcui you'll need a fairly normal Linux or BSD box with: git go python3 pip use pip to install grpcio and grpcio-tools install grpcurl: https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcurl do a git clone of the starlink-grpc-tools url above, also take a look at its readme info get the dish's protoset file and write it to new file dish.protoset , this is an index of all data that can be polled cd /home/eric/starlink-grpc-tools /home/eric/go/bin/grpcurl -plaintext \ -protoset-out dish.protoset \ 192.168.100.1:9200 \ describe SpaceX.API.Device.Device /home/eric/go/bin/grpcurl \ -plaintext \ -d {\"get_history\":{}} \ 192.168.100.1:9200 \ SpaceX.API.Device.Device/Handle | python parseJsonHistory.py output of the above looks like this: 2021-02-06T08:15:56,3600,19.92034332,14,2,0.3125,0,0,0.0,0 full CSV header for the above: datetimestamp_utc,samples,total_ping_drop,count_full_ping_drop,count_obstructed,total_obstructed_ping_drop,count_full_obstructed_ping_drop,count_unscheduled,total_unscheduled_ping_drop,count_full_unscheduled_ping_drop since we are able to acquire the above in a comma-delimited csv format, it's fairly easy to write a script storing the integers from any one of those particular columns into a mariadb db, sqlite, influxdb, or whatever. the following will output about 3.8MB of text for the full history (I believe this to be the full copy of the ring buffer stored in RAM for the terminal's statistics) , pipe it into a text file if you want to manually look at it. /home/eric/go/bin/grpcurl -plaintext -d {\"get_history\":{}} 192.168.100.1:9200 SpaceX.API.Device.Device/Handle same as the above but human readable output /home/eric/go/bin/grpcurl \ -plaintext \ -d {\"get_history\":{}} \ 192.168.100.1:9200 \ SpaceX.API.Device.Device/Handle | python parseJsonHistory.py -v current counter: 299673 All samples: 43200 Valid samples: 43200 Parsed samples: 3600 Total ping drop: 20.03700998 Count of drop == 1: 14 Obstructed: 2 Obstructed ping drop: 0.3125 Obstructed drop == 1: 0 Unscheduled: 0 Unscheduled ping drop: 0.0 Unscheduled drop == 1: 0 see the get_history_notes.txt file for more info SOME EXAMPLE QUERIES these should match with what the json query is in the grpc GUI # get status /home/eric/go/bin/grpcurl \ -plaintext \ -d {\"getStatus\":{}} \ 192.168.100.1:9200 \ SpaceX.API.Device.Device/Handle # get device info /home/eric/go/bin/grpcurl \ -plaintext \ -d {\"getDeviceInfo\":{}} \ 192.168.100.1:9200 \ SpaceX.API.Device.Device/Handle # get history, this outputs a huge amount of data /home/eric/go/bin/grpcurl \ -plaintext \ -d {\"getHistory\":{}} \ 192.168.100.1:9200 \ SpaceX.API.Device.Device/Handle The following is copied/pasted from my notes file on things we can acquire, and then use a tiny shell script with awk, sed, regex, whatever as needed to trim out just the numbers, and put them somewhere else for polling by snmp extend /home/eric/go/bin/grpcurl \ -plaintext \ -d {\"getStatus\":{}} \ 192.168.100.1:9200 \ SpaceX.API.Device.Device/Handle notes on what's what: figures we care about to parse out and turn into just the integers snr can never be higher than 9 fractionobstructed appears to be the percentage of the time that the view is obstructed, as long as the view remains unobstructed, this number appears to slowly decrement over time validS is valid seconds? i think the S is almost likely always Seconds of time "uptimeS": "304439" "snr": 9, "fractionObstructed": 0.0013524292, "validS": 61815.74, "last24hObstructedS": 53 "downlinkThroughputBps": 47915.73, "uplinkThroughputBps": 34980.496, "popPingLatencyMs": 29.266666 example of running the command above twice, the second time a few minutes after the first, to see that fractionObstructed does decrement itself over time first run: 0.0013524292 second run: 0.0013467998
Current thread:
- Starlink terminal data acquisition for network engineers Eric Kuhnke (Feb 06)
- Re: Starlink terminal data acquisition for network engineers Tim Nelson (Feb 07)