network-insight-sdk-generic-datasources

[billdossett]

sorry, very new to this.  I setup vRNI and I want it to look at my vyos router.  I downloaded network-insight-sdk-generic-datasources and specifired VYOS to the -s switch in the command but it fails...

no such file: network-insight-sdk-generic-datasources/network_insight_sdk_generic_datasources/routers_and_switches/vyos/vyos.yml'

and indeed there is not.  Not exactly sure where to turn from there.  Any advice would be hugely appreciated as my lab is made up of devices that are not natively supported - also need to be able to crawl a brocade fastiron/turnboiron switches.

Thanks

[smitmartijn]

Hi,

The generic router/switch SDK is indeed meant for data sources that are not supported out of the box. However, to get data from a device, the SDK needs to know what commands to run and what output to expect - it can't guess these. That's where the templates come in that are in the routers_and_switches directory. And there is currently no template for VyOS, as you've noticed. If you want to try and build one, you can take 1 of the existing templates and customise it to the VyOS commands & output, according to this howto: https://github.com/vmware/network-insight-sdk-generic-datasources/blob/master/EXAMPLE.md 

[billdossett]

i see... it does seem a little misleading having a def file with vyos in it and then no guts to back it up... probably should insert a note in the readme in the git repo to that affect.  I was hoping to have something to show this week for my demo to the NetOps community this week - but thanks, I best get to work!

[smitmartijn]

With this:

•  it does seem a little misleading having a def file with vyos in it 

Do you mean there's a reference to VyOS in network_insight_sdk_generic_datasources/connection/device_type.py ? 

If yes, that's just the list of devices that netmiko (the library it uses to connect via SSH) supports. There's a ton more there of which there are no templates in the repo.

[billdossett]

yes... having the devices in there made it look like there was support for a lot of 'generic' devices...  but it seems there is very little indeed - It would seem that I can't even pull data from my Cisco 2950 switch as there is no support for it - even though it is IOS and IOS is fairly generic across the switches, so basically looks like a dead end for me.  I know 2950s are out of support, but thats what I have in my lab, so I can't really get a feel for what vRNI would do for me.  I assume thats the case anyway as it seems there is only a nexus 5 K yml file under the cisco directory and running that model blew up trying to do some joins of tables.

I wanted to give our NetOps team some insight into what vRNI could do as they are looking at Arista DANZ and I might be able to help with comparing, but I guess not.  We have had extensive demos from VMware, but I like to get my hands dirty and this has pretty much been a waste of time as I can only get insight into vcenter and nsx which we have all seen already.