nanog mailing list archives

Re: Tail-F


From: Colton Conor <colton.conor () gmail com>
Date: Sun, 2 Nov 2014 17:56:40 -0600

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





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