Sensor Collector (formerly Roadrunner)

Introducing Sensor Collector

Sensor Collector is the data collector for the Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance solution (formerly Skylight solution). It can receive or poll Provider Connectivity Assurance Sensors or third-party sources for time series performance monitoring data, perform transformations, and upload the data to Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance (formerly Skylight performance analytics).

Modes of operation

A Sensor Collector instance can run in different modes. The primary modes are:

1. Filewatcher
   • Processes watch a directory for CSV files, parses, and uploads them
   • This is the method used for collection of most embedded sensors
2. Openmetric Gateway
   • Sensor Agents and Flex can securely connect to Sensor Collector and stream Openmetric PM data
   • Sensor Collector will cache and proxy to Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance
3. Openmetrics Scraper
   • Polls an external data source at a defined interval, transforms data, and uploads to Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance
   • Can be used with many open source Openmetric exporter (i.e. snmp-exporter)
   • Requires Accedian Professional Services to enable
4. SNMP alert forwarder
   • If you want to convert Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance threshold alerts into SNMP events, Sensor Collector can be configured to listen for alerts, convert them to SNMP traps and forward them to a given destination
   • More information on this can be found here - How to Provision Sensor Collector to Support SNMP

More information about Sensor Collector configuration settings here:

• Connector Configuration

Sensor Collector and Sensors

Relationship to Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Sensor Agents

Sensor Collector can act as both the data and managment gateway for Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Sensor Agents (formerly Skylight sensor: agents).

• Data gateway - collecting OpenMetric PM data from agents and securely transferring to Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance
• Management gateway - proxying Agent configuration, status and commands between Agents and their orchestration services running centrally on the Provider Connectivity Assurance platform.

Relationship to Skylight Flex

Sensor Collector collects streaming telemetry from Flex devices in the same manner as it does for agents.
There is an template available for Flex when setting up your connector configuration:

Sensor Collector can also be deployed in "standalone" mode when operators want to send Flex data to locations other than Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance.

For more informationm, see:

• Deploying a Standalone Sensor Collector
• How to configure Flex to stream data to Sensor Collector check out the PM Telemetry

Relationship to Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Sensor Capture

The Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Sensor Capture (formerly Skylight sensor: capture) VM image contains an embedded Sensor Collector for data transfer to Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance. A connector configuration will be automatically created with the sensor phone's home to register.

For more information on How to register a Capture Sensor with Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance.

Where it gets deployed

• Sensor Collectors should run close to where the PM data is getting generated.
• If Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is centrally or cloud hosted, the Sensor Collectors can be deployed in each datacenter, cloud provider location, branch location.
• Sensor Collector will then connect and transfer the collect PM data back to analytics.

Sensor Collector is a container based solution that can be deployed directly as via docker or in a Kubernetes environment via Helm.

More on:

• Deploying Sensor Collector in Docker
• Deploying Sensor Collector in Kubernetes

Features

Filtering Session Data

Allow and block lists can be provisioned to control had collected data makes its way back to Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance. See Sensor Collector Session Filter for more information on this capability.

Data Security

• Sensor Collector only requires outbound connectivity, meaning, Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance will never try to connect into the network where Sensor Collector is deployed.
• Data transfer between Sensor Collector and Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is bidirectional once that outbound connection is established
• Data is encrypted in transit to Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance over HTTPS / TLS with mutual certificate authentication - AES-256 cipher with SHA-384
• Outbound connectivity can be through the customers web proxy when reaching out to an Accedian or cloud-hosted Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance.

Data Resilency

Data parsed, polled or streamed to Sensor Collector is cached in case of connectivity issues back to Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance. The cache can typically survive at between 4 to 24 hours, but is highly dependent on the amount of data being collected and transferred.
When connectivity to Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is restored, the cache will be shipped.