Establish a Model-Driven Telemetry Session from a Router to a Collector

Streaming telemetry is a new paradigm in monitoring the health of a network. It provides a mechanism to efficiently stream configuration and operational data of interest from Cisco IOS XR routers. This streamed data is transmitted in a structured format to remote management stations for monitoring and troubleshooting purposes.

With telemetry data, you create a data lake. Analyzing this data, you proactively monitor your network, monitor utilization of CPU and memory, identify patterns, troubleshoot your network in a predictive manner, and devise strategies to create a resilient network using automation.

Telemetry works on a subscription model where you subscribe to the data of interest in the form of sensor paths. The sensor paths describes OpenConfig data models or native Cisco data models. You can access the OpenConfig and Native data models for telemetry from Github, a software development platform that provides hosting services for version control. You choose who initiates the subscription by establishing a telemetry session between the router and the receiver. The session is established using either a dial-out mode or a dial-in mode, described in the Scale-Up Your Network Monitoring Strategy Using Telemetry article.

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Watch this video to discover the power of real-time network management using model-driven telemetry.

This article describes the dial-out mode where the router dials out to the receiver to establish a telemetry session. In this mode, destinations and sensor-paths are configured and bound together into one or more subscriptions. The router continually attempts to establish a session with each destination in the subscription, and streams data to the receiver. The dial-out mode of subscriptions is persistent. Even when a session terminates, the router continually attempts to re-establish a new session with the receiver at regular intervals.

The following image shows a high-level overview of the dial-out mode:

This article describes, with a use case that illustrates the monitoring of CPU utilization, how streaming telemetry data helps you gain better visibility of your network, and make informed decisions to stabilize your network.

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You can programmatically configure a dial-out telemetry session using openconfig-telemetry.yang OpenConfig data model. To get started with using data models, see the Programmability Configuration Guide.