Enterprise IT today spends a huge amount of resources trying to monitor their networks. Having visibility into what a network is 'thinking' or 'doing' is the basis for true network automation and analytics. Legacy networking has long suffered from limitations in network visibility, largely due to slow, inefficient polling mechanisms such as SNMP that only provide a subset of data, at large time intervals, often on the order of minutes. As a result, the operators of legacy networks have been essentially blinded when it comes to what is happening in the fabric.

Today's networks operate at a scale where visibility is even more important for efficient operations, and legacy monitoring solutions simply do not meet the requirements.

Customers want an open, reliable, and scalable method to gather data, via a model based interface, that can be easily consumed and integrated into their broader monitoring infrastructure.

To meet these demands, customers are turning to Cisco Nexus 9000 to provide industry-leading visibility, with the foundation being Cisco NX-OS, the industry's most extensible, open, and programmable network operating system for data centers.

Leveraging gNMI in conjunction with both OpenConfig and our native YANG models, Cisco NX-OS bring a modern approach to network telemetry, providing real-time, event driven visibility via an open, industry standard transport and format.

Just a highlight of the data that can be gathered includes microbursts, buffer utilization, TCAM utilization, QoS data, as well as the traditional data that has always been gathered such as environmental information, protocol state and events, and link utilization. But now, they can be gathered with much finer granularity.

Watch demo: how to stream software telemetry from NX-OS using gNMI

With that in mind, we are pleased to announce a new integration between Cisco NX-OS and InfluxData, which provides a unique alerting and analytics integration to solve complex data center network challenges.

"Network monitoring continues to push the limits of real-time data processing and analysis and this requires access to the latest technology stacks. With this new integration between Cisco and InfluxData, Cisco NX-OS customers have a clearer view into their network activity and the ability to integrate with modern tools, ultimately leading to a more reliable and observable network," said Russ Savage, director of product management at InfluxData.

This integration with Telegraf and the overall TICK stack (Telegraf, InfluxDB, Chronograf and Kapacitor), enables the operator to have a single pane of glass for monitoring their entire network, compute and storage infrastructure.

"NX-OS streaming telemetry via gNMI and the integration with Telegraf, provides a production level monitoring infrastructure, for our web scale, Equinix fabrics.

Combining the industry standard, event driven data from NX-OS, and the consumption and analytics provides by TICK, enables us to drive uptime, reduce MTTR and improve the overall health of our fabrics.  Cisco NX-OS and Telegraf take Equinix's visibility to a new level," added Muhammad Durrani, Senior Director of Global Network Architecture at Equinix.

How Cisco NX-OS and InfluxData together benefits our customers

• Real-Time Network Visibility And Alerting
• Identifying Patterns, Predicting The Future
• Optimized And Enhanced Application Availability/Performance

Curious to learn more? Watch our Cisco NX-OS and InfluxData webinar and check out details of the telemetry collector.