Starting the Telemetry Collector and Collecting Object Counts

Start the Telemetry Collector

Start the Telemetry Collector by invoking the following command in your collector working directory.

docker compose up -d

To confirm that the collector is running in Discovery Mode, tail the container logs and look for the following log statements:

docker logs -f <containerId> 
-or-
docker compose logs -f (from the same directory as your docker compose up -d above)

warning    telemetry           ----------------------------------------------------------------------
warning    telemetry           AGENT STARTED IN LICENSING TOOL MODE - NO DATA WILL BE SHIPPED TO ANALYTICS
warning    telemetry             - unique object counts will be logged to console with a reporting interval of: 5m
warning    telemetry           ----------------------------------------------------------------------

Once you configure your devices to begin sending telemetry to the Telemetry Collector, you can monitor the collector logs for a report that looks like the following:

info       telemetry           -----------------------------------------
info       telemetry           ObjectType: cisco-telemetry-xr-interface             Unique telemetry licenses: 15
info       telemetry           ObjectType: cisco-telemetry-xr-environment           Unique telemetry licenses: 2
info       telemetry           ObjectType: cisco-telemetry-xr-policy                Unique telemetry licenses: 7
info       telemetry           -----------------------------------------
info       telemetry           Total number of unique telemetry licenses: 24info       telemetry           -----------------------------------------

This should be repeated at whatever cadence you configured in your docker-compose file.

Expanded Report

The object counts are also logged to a file at location /var/log/telemetry_report inside the agent container, to make it easier to grab a summary for later inspection.

This file also includes a listing of all of the object identifiers seen in the data stream. This information is not included in the console logs due to the potential volume of logs which that would produce.

This file can be easily extracted by executing the following command:

docker cp {your container id}:/var/log/telemetry_report .

A sample of what this report file looks like is as follows:

 -----------------------------------------
 Summary of object ids detected in data stream:
 -----------------------------------------
 -----------------------------------------
 ObjectType: cisco-telemetry-xr-policy                Unique telemetry licenses: 1
 ObjectType: cisco-telemetry-xr-interface             Unique telemetry licenses: 10
 ObjectType: cisco-telemetry-xr-environment           Unique telemetry licenses: 3
 -----------------------------------------
 Total number of unique telemetry licenses: 14
 -----------------------------------------
 Summary of object ids detected in data stream:
 ---------------------------------------------
 Object Type: cisco-telemetry-xr-interface
   gdf-host_GigabitEthernet0/0/0/0
   gdf-host_GigabitEthernet0/0/0/4
   gdf-host_GigabitEthernet0/0/0/8
   gdf-host_GigabitEthernet0/0/0/1
   gdf-host_GigabitEthernet0/0/0/2
   gdf-host_GigabitEthernet0/0/0/3
   gdf-host_GigabitEthernet0/0/0/9
   gdf-host_GigabitEthernet0/0/0/5
   gdf-host_GigabitEthernet0/0/0/6
   gdf-host_GigabitEthernet0/0/0/7
 Object Type: cisco-telemetry-xr-environment
   gdf-host_0/0/CPU0
   gdf-host_0/1/CPU0
   gdf-host_0/2/CPU0
 Object Type: cisco-telemetry-xr-policy
   gdf-host_dummyPolicyInterface_child-policy-name_gdf-child-policy-class
 -----------------------------------------

What If my Telemetry Collector has been customized?

The Default Out-of-the-Box Telemetry Collector is configured to accept MDT Dial-Out connections from routers and will ingest metrics for the supported Cisco telemetry object types:

IOS XR

• cisco-telemetry-xr-environment
• cisco-telemetry-xr-interface
• cisco-telemetry-xr-policy
• cisco-telemetry-xr-dmm
• cisco-telemetry-xr-slm
• cisco-telemetry-xr-ipsla

You will notice in the supplied docker compose file, that we have exposed a volume mount which maps to the ./config directory in the collector’s working directory.

Looking into this directory, we will see that when we started the collector, two files were placed in this directory:

• input-cisco-telemetry-mdt.conf
• transformation-cisco-telemetry-xr.conf

These specify the input plugin to use for ingesting data into the collector, and the data transformations to apply, respectively.

You may either replace the transformation-cisco-telemetry-xr.conf file with a file containing your own custom data transformation plugin configurations, or add your custom configuration without removing the default transformations. The embedded Telegraf instance within the collector will ingest the new configuration TOML and begin counting your new object types.