Drew,

As I said elsewhere, the control plane was invented to separate management 
functions from the data forwarding process. In-band SNMP to data forwarding 
interfaces violates that separation. I’d say all bets are off. As they say in 
mathematics, this behavior is undefined. :)


-mel via cell

> On Aug 1, 2025, at 11:42 AM, Drew Weaver via NANOG <[email protected]> 
> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Just to correct:
> 
> I was saying that 62% of the polls timeout and that only 38% actually result 
> in responses and those 38% responses take multiples of time longer to 
> actually complete if polling on an in-line interface.
> 
> This is just with a simple bash script running "time check_interfaces <args>" 
> from the Nagios-Tools package and doing hundreds of poll runs in a row with 
> various pauses between pollings.
> 
> It would be a little less of a concern if any other product did this but the 
> idea that they just sort of left it 62% broken and shipped it that way is 
> really making me wonder what else only functions at 38%.
> 
> We don't have a huge budget and the ASR9902 costs almost twice as much as the 
> Arista devices we would've preferred to buy [the Arista device in question 
> has 30x100GE ports and the ASR9902 is basically an 8x100GE router with a very 
> poorly configured midplane/gearbox that ties into some sort of switch [that 
> nobody seems to know how any of that works at Cisco, either].
> 
> If we had an unlimited budget we'd just mulligan this thing and buy the DCS 
> devices that we want but we're stuck with it and if we're stuck with it I 
> don't think it's insane to expect it to operate at least as well as an 
> ASR9001.
> 
> Thanks,
> -Drew
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Saku Ytti via NANOG <[email protected]>
> Sent: Friday, August 1, 2025 2:28 PM
> To: North American Network Operators Group <[email protected]>
> Cc: Saku Ytti <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: Cisco ASR9902 SNMP polling ... is interesting
> 
>> On Fri, 1 Aug 2025 at 16:44, Mel Beckman via NANOG <[email protected]> 
>> wrote:
>> 
>> Also, non-management interfaces do packet processing in silicon at the ASIC 
>> level and don’t have the capacity to do anything more than statistical 
>> sampling of packets that require CPU-level processing to retrieve counters 
>> and generate SNMP responses. 62 % is as good a sampling rate as any other.
> 
> Absolutely not. We expect to process 100% of legitimate control-plane 
> traffic, e.g. BGP, ISIS, LDP, ARP, SNMP etc.
> 
> 62% would be devastating.
> 
> In fair weather this is easy, in bad weather you need hardware based 
> discrimination on what is expected good traffic and what is unexpected bad 
> traffic.
> 
> Drew is in the right to expect functioning SNMP and is experiencing 
> significant regression in behaviour compared to previous devices from the 
> same vendor.
> 
> 
> It would take a very long time to explain how to troubleshoot this, as it is 
> an extremely complicated topic with a lot of nuance that even the best 
> experts of Cisco are unaware of.  I've regularly had TAC handwave problems 
> away 'sometimes it be like that' because they didn't want to do the work. 
> Once our NOC spent months on a case where TAC was blaming our QoS 
> configuration for BGP flaps, by the time I got on it, I escalated it to 
> Xander, and initially even Xander agreed with TAC that we need to look into 
> QoS configuration, until I reminded him that LPTS is not subject to QoS or 
> ACL (which is terrible design choice, for reasons I'm happy to elaborate), 
> which immediately reminded him how LPTS works and the TAC case finally got 
> some traction.
> This is a completely untenable situation, IOS-XR regularly has complicated 
> problems that TAC is not equipped to solve and the expectation is that the 
> user has deep enough knowledge to rebuff them.
> 
> 
> --
>  ++ytti
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