Streaming telemetry
Traditionally, network engineers have relied on the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to gather state information from network devices. Devices encode this information in a binary format using the Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1) and send it to a receiver, typically a collector or a Network Management System (NMS). The latter would use one of the Management Information Bases (MIBs) to decode the received information and store it locally for further processing.
This has been the way we’ve done network monitoring for decades, but this approach has room for improvement:
- The limited number of vendor-neutral data models means that even the basic things require unique MIBs that you may need to update every time you do a major network OS upgrade.
- MIBs use a notation defined by a subset of ASN.1, which isn’t the best way to structure values. It has no concept of lists or key-value pairs. Instead, you must implement these with indexed...
