Telemetry Collector

Overview

Telemetry Collector is a data collection component that works in conjunction with Sensor Collector to securely transmit data to  Provider Connectivity Assurance. At it’s core, it contains an embedded version of Telgraf, which makes it highly customizable for a variety of telemetry data sources.

To understand the importance of telemetry in Provider Connectivity Assurance, check out this article.

Provider Connectivity Assurance comes with two “out-of-the-box” Telemetry Collectors for IOS-XE and IOS-XR routers, as described in detail in this Solution Guide.

For other telemetry sources, CX or Partners can be hired to build custom telemetry ingestion pipelines using the Telemetry Collector and Sensor Collector.

Solution Archietcture

Check out the Solution Architecture article to get a visual overview of the components involved.

Capacity Planning & Compute Requirements

Summarized in this article:

Capacity Planning & Compute Requirements

Modes of Operation

A Telemetry  Collector normally works to collect data and pass to Sensor Collector which, in turn, securely transmits the data to Provider Connectivity Assurance. In some rare use cases, teh customer required transmission of data from a device directly to a Kafka bus, and for that scenario, we implemented a special feature described in this article. Note that this use case is rare and its not the normal mode of operation for Telemetry Collector - it’s main purpose in the solution is to deliver data to Provider Connectivity Assurance.

Telemetry Collector Inventory

The Sensors ► Collectors ► Telemetry page displays a list of Telemetry Collector configurations and their details.

On this page, you can:

• Search and filter the list using the top bar

• Sort the list by clicking a column header

• Refresh the list by selecting theicon on the upper-right.

For more information, see Telemetry Collector User Guide

Create a Telemetry Collector

To create a Telemetry Collector:

1. Click + on the upper right.
   The New telemetry collector side bar appears.
   

   

2. Enter the details.

   1. Transform configuration: pre-provisioned transform configurations that are used to pull and transform incoming data into the application.
      Every Telemetry Collector must have its run time Transformation configuration defined in Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance. This will be pushed down to the Telemetry Collector when it first connects and ‘phones home’. The Transformation configuration is stored in Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance by an API call.

      Note that the transform configuration includes the Base64 of the telegraf.conf TOML, which specifies what objects and metrics are being ingested form the datasource. This field allows the user to choose from the list of pre-provisioned configurations available in the platform, for example, IOS-XE or IOS-XR default ingestion configurations

   2. Data collector server: a Sensor Collector’s gateway address that the telemetry collector will be using to connect to Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance.

3. Click ✓ to save the changes.

View Telemetry Collector details

From the list, click a Telemetry Collector row to view more details. The right sidebar appears, showing a Summary view.

Click the Configuration tab to view and manage configuration details.

Update a Telemetry Collector

To update a Telemetry Collector:

1. From the list, click a Telemetry Collector row.

   The right sidebar appears, showing a Summary view.

2. Click the Configuration tab.

3. Make the required changes.

   Transform configuration cannot be updated.

4. Click ✓ to save the changes.

Generate an authentication token

Generate an authentication token to by used by the Telemetry Collector to authenticate itself on the first connection to Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance.

To generate an authentication token:

1. From the list, click the Telemetry Collector row.

   The right sidebar appears.

2. In Telemetry container setup, click Generate auth token.

Download a Telemetry Collector report

Generate and download a technical report from the  Telemetry Collector to use for troubleshooting.

To download a  Telemetry Collector report:

1. From the list, click the Telemetry Collector row.

   The right sidebar appears.

2. In Generated report file, click Download.