Telemetry 101

What is Telemetry Collection?

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance empowers customers with real-time network visibility and robust service assurance. In addition to a suite of dedicated hardware and software Assurance Sensors that provide precise, active network and service testing in various form factors, Provider Connectivity Assurance also offers flexible telemetry collection capabilities. This powerful combination ensures that every network device—from legacy routers relying on SNMP to modern switches pushing streaming telemetry, and even other diverse data sources—can seamlessly contribute performance data. The result is a truly complete and accurate picture of network health, all within a single assurance platform.

Why is Telemetry Collection Essential?

The modern network is a complex, heterogeneous environment, presenting a significant challenge in consolidating disparate telemetry sources for effective network assurance. Organizations routinely operate a mix of older devices utilizing Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) alongside newer equipment leveraging advanced streaming telemetry. Compounding this, networks often feature multi-vendor devices, while modern applications like SD-WAN expose critical performance metrics via APIs, and message buses like Kafka are frequently employed for data aggregation. Even with Assurance Sensors strategically deployed for active network testing, a wealth of telemetry from countless other devices and data sources remains untapped. The Provider Connectivity Assurance telemetry collection bridges this critical gap, ensuring that all available data is harnessed, analyzed, and unified for a truly comprehensive understanding of network health.

To address this complexity comprehensively, Provider Connectivity Assurance provides default "out-of-the-box" telemetry ingestion for Cisco IOS XE and IOS XR routers. For all other diverse network sources, it offers a highly customizable, Telegraf-based containerized software component—the Telemetry Collector. This collector can be expertly tailored by Cisco CX or certified Partners to ingest virtually any performance data, ensuring no valuable insight is left behind. This powerful ingestion capability allows Provider Connectivity Assurance to collect, normalize, and correlate data from across your entire heterogeneous network environment. By seamlessly integrating this passive telemetry with active Assurance Sensor performance monitoring, Provider Connectivity Assurance delivers unparalleled, true end-to-end visibility, providing a single pane of glass for all your network assurance needs and empowering your teams with the insights needed for proactive management and superior service delivery.