Welcome to Catalyst Wireless Telemetry

This small piece of code allows you to quickly create a Grafana Dashboard that shows information from the Catalyst Wireless Sensors embedded in the APs.

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

Architecture

It uses:

• Telegraf: server-based agent for collecting and sending metrics and events.
• InfluxDB 2.0: time series database.
• Grafana: dashboard.

Screenshots

Containers in steady state:

AP Sensor Dashboard:

Instructions

Requirements

• Docker installed (this app runs on Docker)

Versions

This code has been developed and tested with Python 3.8.

Steps

1. Clone the repository.

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

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

    cd Catalyst-Wireless-Telemetry/
    docker compose build
   

3. [Optional] If you wish to edit any settings, 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 afterward it will stop.

   Note 2: the container influxdb_cli needs 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, you might skip it.

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

   • AP Sensor Data

   You should be able to access it and it will be empty.

7. Now you shall configure the Catalyst 9800 Wireless LAN Controller (WLC) in order to collect the AP sensor data. Access the WLC CLI and configure the ap profile:

    ap profile default-ap-profile
     description "Default AP Profile for IOS-XE"
     sensor environment air-quality
      no shutdown
     sensor environment temperature
      no shutdown
   

   Further instructions on how to do so can be found in the Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controller Software Configuration Guide, Cisco IOS XE Cupertino 17.9.x.

8. The data must be sent from the WLC to telegraf, to do so the WLC uses streaming telemetry. Configure the following subscriptions:

   telemetry ietf subscription 20
    encoding encode-kvgpb
    filter xpath /wireless-access-point-oper:access-point-oper-data/ap-temp
    source-address w.x.y.z
    stream yang-push
    update-policy periodic 5000
    receiver ip address a.b.c.d 57000 protocol grpc-tcp
   telemetry ietf subscription 21
    encoding encode-kvgpb
    filter xpath /wireless-access-point-oper:access-point-oper-data/ap-air-quality
    source-address w.x.y.z
    stream yang-push
    update-policy periodic 5000
    receiver ip address a.b.c.d 57000 protocol grpc-tcp
   telemetry ietf subscription 22
    encoding encode-kvgpb
    filter xpath /wireless-access-point-oper:access-point-oper-data/ap-name-mac-map
    source-address w.x.y.z
    stream yang-push
    update-policy periodic 5000
    receiver ip address ab.c.d 57000 protocol grpc-tcp
   

   Replace w.x.y.z with the IP address of the WLC. Replace a.b.c.d with the IP address of the machine running telegraf. Ensure that there's no firewall in between blocking the port 57000.

   The subscription numbers are irrelevant as long as they don't overlap. The last subscription sends the corresponding hostnames for each ap mac address allowing for a nicer print.

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

License

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