Receiver Configuration

The AOS Telegraf input plugin can be used to receive streaming telemetery from AOS. Telegraf is an agent for collecting, processing, aggregating, and writing metrics. This is the component of AOSOM-Streaming that handles the reception of the protobuf messages from AOS. The Telegraf platform consists of input and output plugins that customers can choose from for aggregating and storing metrics to different backend databases. The AOS input plugin for Telegraf will deserialize the protobuf stream and create metrics that can then be sent to a particular backend database, e.g., Prometheus, InfluxDB, or Elasticsearch.

Configuring Using Telegraf Plugin

The configuration described here assumes we are using the AOS Telegraf input plugin. Configuring streaming receivers in AOS can be done through the AOS web interface (see below), or handled by the Telegraf plugin by providing it the AOS credentials. A separate AOS account with only the streaming credentials is recommended. If the configuration is done through the GUI, then there is no need to supply credentials in the Telegraf config file.

The easiest way to run the Telegraf receiver is in a docker container. The docker-compose.yml snippet below shows the configuration for the Telegraf container. This will pull the latest Apstra supported Telegraf container from Docker Hub.

# Telegraf container config
  telegraf-prom:
    image: apstra/telegraf:latest
    command: telegraf
    volumes:
      - ./config/telegraf-prom.toml:/etc/telegraf/telegraf.conf
    ports:
      - '9999:9999'

The Telegraf configuration file - ./config/telegraf-prom.toml - is mapped to /etc/telegraf/telegraf.conf on the container. The input and output plugin configurations are shown in the snippet below. The output plugin is configured for the Prometheus client and will listen on port 9126. The input plugin is configured for AOS.

# Configuration for Prometheus server to expose metrics
[[outputs.prometheus_client]]
  listen = ":9126"
  expiration_interval = "0"

[[inputs.aos]]
  address = "10.1.1.200"
  port = 9999
  streaming_type = [ "perfmon", "alerts", "events" ]
  aos_server = "$AOS_SERVER"
  aos_port = $AOS_PORT
  aos_login = "$AOS_LOGIN"
  aos_password = "$AOS_PASSWORD"

AOS Plugin Configuration

address - specifies the IP address of the streaming receiver

port - specifies the port that the streaming receiver will be listening on

streaming_type - specifies the type of data to be streamed from AOS to this receiver

The rest of these parameters are only necessary if we want the AOS Telegraf plugin to configure the streaming receivers in AOS via the API.

aos_server - specifies the IP address of the AOS server

aos_port - should always be 443

aos_login - AOS username

aos_password - AOS password

Configuring Using AOS Web Interface

The AOS server can be configured to stream alerts, events and perfmon, or any combination thereof. Each data type is sent to a streaming receiver over its own TCP socket. Even if all three data types are configured for the same streaming receiver, there will be three connections created between the AOS server and the streaming receiver. This also allows for all three types to be sent to three different streaming receivers.

To access receivers - from the AOS web interface, navigate to Platform / Streaming / Receivers to see the list view. (In previous AOS versions receivers were called streaming endpoints.)

To sort - click one of the sortable headers. To reverse the sort order, click the header again.

Receivers include the following details:

• Hostname - Hostname
• Port - default: 4444
• Message Type - alerts, events, perfmon
• Sequencing Mode - unsequenced, sequenced

Creating Receiver

1. From the AOS web interface, navigate to Platform / Streaming / Receivers, then click Create Receiver.
2. Enter/select required values.
3. Click Create to create the receiver and return to the list view.

Deleting Receiver

1. From the AOS web interface, navigate to Platform / Streaming / Receivers, then click the delete button corresponding to the receiver to delete.
2. Click Delete to delete the receiver from the system and return to the list view.