Programmability and Automation Meetup: Unlocking Network Telemetry

In this session presented by Daniel Hertzberg from Arista Networks, we provided an in-depth explanation of network monitoring and analytics with streaming telemetry, leveraging the latest high-performance gRPC interface, gNMI. We covered all the gRPC fundamentals, as well as gave an introduction to gNMI (gRPC Network Management Interface) with its RPCs and interacting with network devices for real-world use cases for streaming telemetry. We discovered how streaming telemetry revolutionized network monitoring by providing real-time insights into network performance and health. We learned about YANG (Yet Another Next Generation) data modeling language and how it facilitated standardized network management. We also explored OpenConfig, a community-driven effort to standardize network device configuration and telemetry using YANG models. By the end of this session, network operators found great use cases for removing a lot of their polling/SNMP infrastructure for modern network tools like the TIG stack and Prometheus.