Welcome to Catalyst Telemetry Dashboard

This small piece of code allows you to quickly create a few Grafana Dashboards that are fed from different DNA elements such as Catalyst Center and vManage (SD-WAN).

The Catalyst Centers used are:

• Sandbox: https://sandboxdnac.cisco.com
• Live: https://live.cisco.com

Warning: it seems that recently the live.cisco.com Catalyst Center was changed and doesn't allow API access.

The vManage used is:

• SD-WAN demo: https://sdwandemo.cisco.com

The use case behind this project is to show how easy is to integrate the telemetry/assurance information from DNA elements inside a customized dashboard that a customer might have.

You can find the basic instructions to run the code in the section Instructions.

Architecture

The following image illustrates the architecture:

It uses:

• Collector: Python-based script.
• InfluxDB 2.0: time series database.
• Grafana: dashboard.

Screenshots

Containers in steady state:

Catalyst Center General Health Status Dashboard:

Catalyst Center Hardware Health Dashboard

SD-WAN General Health Status Dashboard:

Instructions

Requirements

• Access to internet (to connect to the Catalyst Center & SD-WAN instances)
• Docker installed (this app runs on Docker)

Versions

This code has been developed and tested with Python 3.8, using the Catalyst Center SDK Dashboard v2.5.0 and influxdb-client v1.30.0 (InfluxDB 2.0).

Steps

1. Clone the repository.

   git clone https://wwwin-github.cisco.com/nfitelop/Catalyst-Telemetry
   

2. Go to the directory where the docker-compose.yml file is located, pull and build all images of the container:

    cd Catalyst-Telemetry/
    docker-compose build
   

3. [Optional] If you wish to add your own Catalyst Center or SD-WAN instance, please edit the .env file.

4. Start all the containers in the background (-d). Grafana and InfluxDB will be automatically configured.

    docker-compose up -d
   

   Note: there is a container named influxdb_cli that just needs to run once, this container will do all the setup work for you and afterwards it will stop.

   Note 2: the containers influxdb_cli and collector need the database to be up and running, that takes some time, you might see both containers restarting a few times before they can do their job.

5. Browse to http://localhost:3000/ to open Grafana and log in using:

   • Username: admin
   • Password: admin

   It will ask for a password change, use the same passwords again.

6. Inside Grafana, click on the Search button on the left-side menu, you will see two dashboards if everything worked correctly:

   • Catalyst Center - General Health Status
   • Catalyst - Hardware Health
   • SD-WAN - General Health Status

   You should be able to access them and see the information from the different sources.

Cleanup

You can bring down all containers in this sample app with:

   docker-compose down

To make sure they're gone, check with:

   docker-compose ps

Caveats

In the dashboard SD-WAN - General Health Status the panel Transport Health might be empty sometimes. The data in this panel is obtained in vManage every hour, so the refresh rate is 1 hour. If the dashboard time range is configured to less than 1 hour it will be empty. If you want to see data configure the dashboard time range to at least 1 hour. If you want multiple data points 3 hours is a good setting, but it requires the collector to be running at least for that amount of time.

Troubleshooting

A common error is that the Catalyst Center has an invalid certificate, please check that SSL verfication is turned off to avoid any issues.

License

Check the LICENSE file attached to the project to see all the details.