Is anyone using Tail-f software or know anything similar? We are looking
for a solution that is vendor agnostic. Can do simple command like show
interface so even non-network techs and CSR's can get basic is the port up
or down type stats without having to directly login to the network.
Is anyone using Tail-f software or know anything similar? We are looking
for a solution that is vendor agnostic. Can do simple command like show
I've only read of this, but my understanding is the Tail-F product is
for configuration management and supporting provisioning automations
anyways, monitoring configs sure. As far as I know they cannot
monitor or show network operational status, so your use case may not
overlap with their capabilities, and perhaps, what you are likely
suggesting is something that unfortunately doesn't exist yet: a tool
for both configuring and observing a detailed operational state of the
network devices in a vendor-agnostic way.
However, for simple bandwidth statistics and port Up/Down; for most
devices, this information is available through SNMP based management
tools.
Basic Up/Down and statistics could generally be gathered by any good
SNMP-based NMS / network monitoring product, there are thousands of
these, or OSS such as Cacti, Zenoss, and proprietary ones such as HP
OpenView, SolarWinds, InterMapper, Whatsup; also, just about every
major network device vendor has their element management system.
Various NMS can also be configured to run some selected code or offer
up a GUI command for running a snmpwalk against the ifOperStatus or
ifIn/Out Octets.
Tail-F's ConfD can operate as a front-end CLI and do the things he wants it
to do in an operational sense but I would agree it may not be the easiest
to use tool for simply monitoring and grabbing interface state/statistics.
It's fairly flexible and can do a lot of abstracted things through its
ConfD element but there is some backend work to make it happen. Not as
much as doing it from scratch but still a bit of work. It can abstract
different device CLIs so they all look the same and use the same commands
and you can extend the CLI to do custom things as well if you want.
The whole system is fairly powerful and very extensibe. There are
monitoring elements built into it and It could be a full blown monitoring
system, really just depends on the scale you need and how much work you
want to put into it.
Phil
I am aware that you can see if a port is up or down through SNMP. I guess
that was a bad example. I want to see the entire output of a show interface
command. For example, we have multiple types of access networks (GPON, DSL,
Cisco ethernet switches). Some of the show interface commands are fairly
basic, but others like on a DSL port show much more information like sync
rate, signal loss, etc. The only way to get this information on some
platforms is to run the show interface command for CLI I believe, or login
to the access platform's GUI interface. Both of these task aren't so easy
when you are dealing with multiple access platforms.
Yes, the information in SNMP is pretty well spread out, because a SNMP
get request returns a single value. SO you have to find all the OIDs
that return the information you want to see. Simple but sometimes very,
very tedious. You then wrap your data collection in a
application/webpage that displays it.
Vendor agnostic. Not turn-key without spending lots and lots and lots
of money.
Another option: have you tried using Expect?
Conor,
Tail-f will give you a global view of your network configurations, and will keep the local database in sync with the devices. This gives you the ability to search and update config across devices.
If you want to see the live status, then you can compile an snmp mib and attach that to the device, so your team can see both config and status via a single CLI.
Really though, it's about service provisioning and orchestration across multiple vendors, but there can be a fair amount of work there depending on what you are trying to achieve.
There is a also a REST interface that makes it pretty simple to access anything in the database and present it in a web page.
Cheers
Pete