gnmi-gateway

⚠ Experimental. Please take note that this is a pre-release version.

gNMI Gateway

gnmi-gateway is a distributed and highly available service for connecting to multiple gNMI targets. Currently only the gNMI Subscribe RPC is supported.

Common use-cases are:

• Provide multiple streams to gNMI clients while maintaining a single connection to gNMI targets.
• Provide highly available streams to gNMI clients.
• Distribute gNMI target connections among multiple servers.
• Export gNMI streams to other data formats and protocols.
• Dynamically form connections to gNMI targets based on data in other systems (e.g., your NMS, or network inventory, etc).

Design

Overview

gnmi-gateway is written in Golang and is designed to be easily extendable for users and organizations interested in utilizing gNMI data (modeled with OpenConfig). However, if you aren't interested in writing your own code there are a few built-in components to make it easy to use from the command-line.

gnmi-gateway connects to gNMI targets based on data received from Target Loaders. gNMI Notification messages are then forwarded to the gnmi-gateway cache, gNMI clients with relevant subscriptions, and Exporters which may forward data to other systems or protocols.

Target Loaders

Target Loaders are components that are used to generate target connection configurations that are sent to the connection manager. Target Loaders and the connection manager communicate using the target.proto model found in the github.com/openconfig/gnmi repository. gnmi-gateway accepts a few additional parameters in the Target.meta field:

NoTLSVerify: inlcude this field to disable TLS verification. This enables
             the use of self-signed certificates. Note that connections
             without TLS are not supported per the gNMI specification.

NoLock: include this field to disable locking for the associated target even
        if clustering is enabled. Only include this field if you are
        handling de-duplication outside of gnmi-gateway.

There are a few Target Loaders included with gnmi-gateway that you can use right away using the -TargetLoaders flag from the command-line. The Target Loaders included are:

• json
• netbox
• simple

If you'd like to build your own Target Loader see loaders/loader.go for details on how to implement the TargetLoader interface.

Exporters

Exporters are components of gnmi-gateway that are used to convert gNMI data into other formats and protocols for use by other systems. Some simple examples would be sending gNMI notifications to a Kafka stream or storing gNMI messages in a data store. Exporters will receive each gNMI message in the stream as it is received but also have access to query the local gNMI cache.

Exporters may be run on the same servers as your gnmi-gateway target connections or you can run exporters on a server acting as clients to another gnmi-gateway cluster. This allows for some flexibility in your deployment design.

Some Exporters have been included with gnmi-gateway and you can start using them by providing a comma-separated list of Exporters from the command-line with the -Exporters flag. The included Exporters are:

• debug (log to stdout)
• kafka
• prometheus

To build a custom Exporter see exporters/exporter.go for details on how to implement the Exporter interface.

Documentation

Most of the documentation resides in this repo. Please feel welcome to file a Github issue if you have question.

See the godoc pages for documentation and usage examples.

Pre-requisites

• Golang 1.14 or newer
• A target that supports gNMI Subscribe. This is usually a network router or switch.
• A running instance of Apache Zookeeper. If you only want to run a single instance of gnmi-gateway (i.e. without failover) you don't need Zookeeper. See the development instructions below for how to set up a Zookeeper Docker container.

Source Install / Run Instructions

These are the commands that would be used to start gnmi-gateway on a Linux install that has make installed. If you are not on a platform that is compatible with the Makefile the commands inside the Makefile should translate to other platforms that support Golang.

1. git clone github.com/openconfig/gnmi-gateway
2. cd gnmi-gateway
3. make tls (If you have your own TLS server certificates you may use them instead. It is recommended that you do not use these generated self-signed certificates in production.)
4. Copy targets-example.json to targets.json and modify it to match your gNMI target. You need to modify the target name, target address, and credentials.
5. make run
6. gnmi-gateway should now be running. If you are unable to get gnmi-gateway running at this point please check the ./gnmi-gateway -help dialog for tips (assuming the binary built) and then file an issue on Github if you are still unsuccessful.

Examples

gNMI to Prometheus Exporter

gnmi-gateway ships with an Exporter that allows you to export OpenConfig-modeled gNMI data to Prometheus.

See the README in examples/gnmi-prometheus/ for details on how to start the gnmi-gateway Docker container and connect it to a Prometheus Docker container.

Production Deployment

It is recommended that gnmi-gateway be deployed to immutable infrastructure such as Kubernetes or an AWS EC2 instance (or something else). New version tags can be retrieved from Github and deployed with your configuration.

Most configuration can be done via command-line flags. If you need more complex options for configuring gnmi-gateway or want to configure the gateway at runtime you can create a .go file that imports the gateway package and create a configuration.GatewayConfig instance, passing that to gateway.NewGateway, and then calling StartGateway. For an example of how this is done you can look at the code in Main() in gateway/main.go.

To enable clustering of gnmi-gateway you will need an instance (or ideally a cluster) of Apache Zookeeper accessible to all of the gnmi-gateway instances. Additionally all of the gnmi-gateway instances in the cluster must be able to reach each other over the network.

It is recommended that you limit the deployment of a cluster to a single geographic region or a single geographic area with consistent latency for ideal performance. You may run instances of gnmi-gateway distributed globally but may encounter performance issues. You'll likely encounter timeout issues with Zookeeper as your latency begins to approach the Zookeeper tickTime.

Development

Check the to-do list for any open known issues or new features.

Start Zookeeper for development

This should ony be used for development and not for production. The container will maintain no state; you will have a completely empty Zookeeper tree when this starts/restarts. To start zookeeper and expose the server on 127.0.0.1:2181 run:

docker run -d -p 2181:2181 zookeeper

Test the code

You can test the code by running make test.

You can run integration tests by running make integration. (Ensure you have Zookeeper running on 127.0.0.1:2181.)

You can run test coverage by running make cover.

Build the code

You can build the gnmi-gateway binary by running make build.

Contributions

Please make any changes in a separate fork and make a PR to the release branch when your changes are ready. Tags for new release versions will be cut from the release branch.

You must also sign a one-time CLA for any pull requests to be accepted. See CONTRIBUTING.md for details.

Troubleshooting

"context deadline exceeded" Error

If you see a context deadline exceeded error from the connection manager it means there is some underlying issue that is causing the connection to a target to fail. This seems to often be a TLS issue (wrong certs, bad config, etc) but it could be something else. Try running gnmi-gateway with gRPC connection logging enabled. For example:

GRPC_GO_LOG_VERBOSITY_LEVEL=99 GRPC_GO_LOG_SEVERITY_LEVEL=info ./gnmi-gateway