New component: receiver to fetch telemetry from Cisco Operating Systems: NX-OS, IOS XE, OS

[k-shaikh]

The purpose and use-cases of the new component

Many Cisco network switches and storage devices run one of the following operating systems: NX-OS/IOS XE/IOS. There is a need for a otel exporter receiver to receive metrics from these devices and export it to the available open telemetry exporters. The capability will allow observability platforms to offer a unified view of application and infrastructure, including network and storage devices for Cisco device.

There is an existing standalone exporter that allows one to pull metrics from NX-OS/IOS XE/IOS devices and expose them as prometheus metrics to be scraped by the Open telemetry collector. A quick solution will be to port this export and convert it to a OTEL collector receiver to make the integration more native to the Open telemetry collector.

The receiver can pull metrics from the devices, running above mentioned OSs, over SSH using a config like below.

Example configuration for the component

  cisco_os:
    collection_interval: 30s
    timeout: 30s
    devices:
      - host: 10.1.1.122
        username: foo
        password: bar
      - host: 10.2.2.1
        username: foo
        key_file: /etc/ssh-keys/foo.key
    scrapers:
      bgp: true
      environment: true
      facts: true
      interfaces: true
      optics: true

Telemetry data types supported

Metrics

Code Owner(s)

@etserend
@k-shaikh

Sponsor (optional)

@dmitryax

Additional context

No response

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[dmitryax]

If the component's go package is ciscoosreceiver, the config section can be ciscoos or cisco_os.

What does collectors config option represent? Is it needed to enable/disable particular groups of metrics? The mdatagen library already generates config interface to enable/disable particular metrics OOTB. If the grouping is required, it probably should be called differently. Potentially can be scrapers as done in the host metrics receiver

[k-shaikh]

@dmitryax , I have updated the config example. The collectors enable/disable collection of different group of metrics and have been renamed to scrapers.

[dmitryax]

If you want to put extra configs specific to scrapers going forward, it's better to make them groups with enabled option instead of a boolean flags. Then each of them will have metrics section inside generated by mdatagen

[dmitryax]

I'll sponsor this receiver

[k-shaikh]

Thank you @dmitryax