To Rob and co-authors of the gNMI draft,


First of all I want to congratulate on this draft. Speaking for Swisscom, from 
a service provider perspective, Streaming Telemetry is an important piece of 
the Network Telemetry framework. We see with gNMI a big potential in replacing 
SNMP in the long run.



We are looking forward to the next draft and would like to give some input 
regarding gRPC dial-out, openconfig version support and data types.



We are working since a few months with Huawei, Cisco, Juniper and pmacct (Paolo 
Lucente, open source collector daemon) together by using gNMI and openconfig 
YANG models to achieve the goal of an open and vendor independent Streaming 
Telemetry data collection, which integrates into a Big Data (message broker and 
schema registration) architecture.



We understood that the draft-openconfig-rtgwg-gnmi-spec-01 scope is gRPC 
dial-in where in draft-openconfig-rtgwg-gnmi-spec-00 in Appendix B was stated 
that dial-out is on the road map for the next draft.



For the reader it would be beneficial to describe the difference target data 
collection/transport use cases where dial-in vs. dial-out suits the best. In 
particular covering the high availability aspect which we think is key for 
autonomous (closed loop) operation.



We chose gRPC dial-out with anycast & BFD (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5883) 
for load distribution and high availability. We have good experience from IPFIX 
(UDP) and BMP (TCP) with this setup and are happy with the simplicity in 
network integration and scalability.



Regarding gNMI data type support

https://github.com/openconfig/reference/blob/master/rpc/gnmi/gnmi-specification.md#23-structured-data-types



We believe that less would help in better adoption and interoperability. We 
favor JSON_IETF and Proto.



Regarding openconfig version support.



We understood from

https://github.com/openconfig/reference/blob/master/rpc/gnmi/gnmi-specification.md#322-the-capabilityresponse-message

and

https://github.com/openconfig/reference/blob/master/rpc/gnmi/gnmi-specification.md#261-the-modeldata-message



that the supported data model version can be obtained before metrics are sent 
by a notification message.



Within the notification message, the data model version is missing 
https://github.com/openconfig/reference/blob/master/rpc/gnmi/gnmi-specification.md#21-reusable-notification-message-format



This means that the mapping between device and model version has to be stored 
and maintained on the data collection side. This could be simplified by sending 
the data model version also in the notification message.



The maintenance of the openconfig model version mapping has been challenging. 
Depending on router software upgrades and vendor this can change during 
operation. One of the three mentioned vendors which is exposed the longest to 
this environment, has a quiet big version mapping map which outlines where we 
are heading to. On top, the version information is difficult to obtain on 
https://github.com/openconfig/public/tree/master/release/models since it is 
embedded within the description of the openconfig YANG models. 
draft-openconfig-netmod-model-catalog-02.txt is addressing this with the right 
approach and we believe is an important piece of this puzzle.



Kind regards
Thomas Graf
____________________________________________________________________________
Network Engineer
Tribe IT Clouds
Telefon +41-58-223 84 01
Mobile   +41-79-728 80 12
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
____________________________________________________________________________
Swisscom (Schweiz) AG
IT, Network & Infrastructure
Tribe IT Clouds
Binzring 17
8045 Zürich
www.swisscom.com
Postadresse:
Binzring 17
8045 Zürich


Attachment: smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature

_______________________________________________
rtgwg mailing list
[email protected]
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/rtgwg

Reply via email to