This project provides a comprehensive Grafana dashboard for monitoring the Cisco C9800 Wireless LAN Controller (WLC) running IOS-XE. The monitoring solution leverages Cisco's Model-Driven Telemetry system using the gRPC Dial-Out method to collect real-time data. Telegraf, InfluxDB, and Grafana (TIG) stack are utilized to process and visualize this data. Telegraf acts as the collector, InfluxDB as the time-series database, and Grafana as the front-end application for creating detailed, dynamic dashboards. This setup allows network administrators to gain deep insights into the performance and status of their Cisco C9800 WLC, ensuring optimal network management and troubleshooting capabilities.
- Linux Server: Distributions like Ubuntu, CentOS, etc.
- Docker Engine: Follow the installation instructions available here.
- Telemetry Configuration: Ensure it is properly set up on the Cisco 9800 WLC. A sample configuration file is included in this repository.
Gain root access to the Linux server, then clone the repository using the command below.
git clone https://github.com/Diptiranjan9/Grafana-Telemetry-for-CiscoCatalyst-9800WLC.git
The repository will be copied to your /root directory under the name Grafana-Telemetry-for-CiscoCatalyst-9800WLC.git. Navigate to this folder and run the following command to download and start the Docker services in detached mode:
cd /root/Grafana-Telemetry-for-CiscoCatalyst-9800WLC.git
docker compose up -d
Please verify if the Docker containers are up. If you notice that the Telegraf container has restarted, do not worry; it may be due to the InfluxDB authentication not configured. Follow the steps below to verify:
docker container ls or docker ps
Find your server's IP address, then open your browser and access the InfluxDB web page forwarded on port 8086. Ensure that the firewall on your server allows traffic on ports 8086, 3000, and 57000 for the necessary services to run.
ip addr show # This command is to verify your server ip address
1. With InfluxDB running, visit `http://[server ip]:8086`
2. Click Get Started
Set up your initial user
3. Enter a Username for your initial user.
4. Enter a Password and Confirm Password for your user.
5. Enter your initial Organization Name.
6. Enter your initial Bucket Name.
7. Click Continue.
Copy the provided operator API token and store it for safe keeping.
This is a bit more complicated process which is explained in this forum topic, but essentially it requires below steps:
- Gain CLI access to the InfluxDB container.
docker exec -it influxdb bash
- First, authenticate to gain access, then execute the DBRP command to map from the bucket to the database.
influx config create --config-name <config-name> --host-url http://localhost:8086 --org <your-org-name> --token <your-auth-token>
influx auth list
influx v1 dbrp create --db telegraf-influxsql --rp autogen --bucket-id <bucketid> --org-id <org-id>
- Note: You will find the authentication token, bucket ID, and organization ID from the HTTP access of the database.
Configure Telegraf to receive Cisco Network Telemetry
vim /var/lib/docker/volumes/grafana_telegraf_data/_data/telegraf.conf
We must add the necessary information to enable the “cisco_telemetry_mdt” Telegraf plugin. We need to add a few lines of code to the Service Input Plugins section of the file. First, lets navigate to that section of the file:
/SERVICE INPUT
- We will add the following Telegraf plugin lines just inside this section:
[[inputs.cisco_telemetry_mdt]]
transport = "grpc"
service_address = ":57000"
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We also need to configure Telegraf to connect to the InfluxDB that we created earlier:
/OUTPUT PLUGINS
[[outputs.influxdb_v2]]
urls = ["http://influxdb:8086"]
token = "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" #put admin token here
organization = "Org Name"
bucket = "telegraf"
- After completing these configurations, restart the Telegraf container using the following steps:
docker restart telegraf
You should verify that you can access the Grafana dashboard at http://[server ip]:3000
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Login with User: admin, Pass: # which you have mentioned in your docker compose file
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We need to configure InfluxDB as the data source. Click the “Add data source” button on the dashboard and then select “InfluxDB” as the database.
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Please follow below step:
- Note: Use authentication credentials for the InfluxDB login ID and password.
This portion is fairly straight forward, once you have the commands which I will included in this repository to get the data you are looking for.
Cisco’s model-driven telemetry is provided by “subscriptions.” You subscribe to a particular metric category that you want to send to the receiver. Because I’m not an expert with yang models, I struggled to find some of the statistics that I was interested in seeing. I’ll show you the method I used to find the metrics.
The statistics or metrics that you will want to visualize, are organized in a yang model. The yang model is basically a standard way of organizing information into a hierarchy, and you will need to reference the entire hierarchy/path when you subscribe to a group of metrics.
First, you will want to obtain the yang models for IOS-XE devices. The yang models can be found here. It’s easiest to download the entire bundle, and then just navigate to the IOS-XE files. Note: These models are version specific, so you should make sure you are referencing the files for the version you are working with.
If you’ve never worked with Yang models before, you’re probably looking at this pile of files and wondering what the hell you’re supposed to do with them. I should make it clear that you don’t actually need these files to make this work. The files simply provide a way for us to figure out where the interesting metrics exist within the yang model, so that we can configure the 9800 to send them. We won’t be uploading these files to the server. We will just be referencing them on our workstation.
You can utilize the Cisco YANG Suite to explore all these metrics. Please click here for details on the YANG Suite and instructions on how to explore all metrics using XPath.
Now that you have found the metrics you want to visualize, we need to configure the Catalyst 9800 to stream the data to Telegraf. This is done by creating “telemetry subscriptions” in the 9800. These subscriptions define the information you want, the format you want it in, where you want to send it, and how often you want to send it there. Here is an example of one telemetry subscription (we will have many, by the time we are done with this):
telemetry ietf subscription 21
encoding encode-kvgpb
filter xpath /wireless-client-oper:client-oper-data/traffic-stats
source-address [wlc ip]
stream yang-push
update-policy periodic 1000
receiver ip address [server ip] 57000 protocol grpc-tcp
You must also enable netconf on the controller for this to work:
netconf ssh
netconf-yang
Once you paste this configuration into the controller, you will want to see if the stream is active, and if the subscriptions are valid. You can do that with the following commands:
show telemetry internal connection
show telemetry ietf subscription [id]
Please find the xpaths which I have set up to find the metrics:
/wireless-client-oper:client-oper-data/traffic-stats
/wireless-client-oper:client-oper-data/common-oper-data
/wireless-client-oper:client-oper-data/dc-info
/wireless-client-oper:client-oper-data/sisf-db-mac
/wireless-client-oper:client-oper-data/dot11-oper-data
/if:interfaces-state/interface
/platform-sw-ios-xe-oper:cisco-platform-software/control-processes
/process-cpu-ios-xe-oper:cpu-usage/cpu-utilization/one-minute
/cdp-ios-xe-oper:cdp-neighbor-details/cdp-neighbor-detail/device-name
/native/version
/interfaces-ios-xe-oper:interfaces/interface/ipv4
/cdp-ios-xe-oper:cdp-neighbor-details/cdp-neighbor-detail/local-intf-name
/platform-ios-xe-oper:components/component/state/serial-no
/cdp-ios-xe-oper:cdp-neighbor-details/cdp-neighbor-detail/port-id
/cdp-ios-xe-oper:cdp-neighbor-details/cdp-neighbor-detail/mgmt-address
/memory-ios-xe-oper:memory-statistics/memory-statistic
/platform-ios-xe-oper:components/component/state/description
/wireless-access-point-oper:access-point-oper-data/capwap-data
/wireless-access-point-oper:access-point-oper-data/ap-name-mac-map
/wireless-access-point-oper:access-point-oper-data/radio-oper-data
/wireless-rrm-oper:rrm-oper-data/rrm-measurement
/wireless-mobility-oper:mobility-oper-data/ap-peer-list
/wireless-mobility-oper:mobility-oper-data/wlan-client-limit
/wireless-access-point-oper:access-point-oper-data/ssid-counters
/ap-global-oper-data/ap-join-stats/ap-join-info
It’s important to understand that at this point, Telegraf is receiving the streams of data from the controller, even if you haven’t setup any graphs yet. The data is continuously being updated and stored in InfluxDB, regardless of whether or not you use it. This allows you to experiment with all different types of charts with real data. The longer you wait to configure the charts, the more historical data the system will be able to show you.
Click on "New" to create a new dashboard. After that, you can add new visualizations or import an existing dashboard. I have added my dashboard design in this repository: Grafana-Dashboard-Design.json You can import it to visualize the above xpath data.
If you want to design your own dashboard, click on Add Visualization. It will prompt you to select a data source; please choose the InfluxDB data source you created earlier.
It will display a panel:
Below is an example of the Client RSSI and SNR panel configuration. You can use this as a guide to set up other metrics as well:
Grafana supports the use of variables in queries. Variables are the key to making an effective dashboard that you can use ongoing. Variables allow you to have a drop-down box at the top of the dashboard to select data to be used in the queries. Things like Client, AP, Band, Username can be set as variables, and then selected in drop-down menus and the charts will react to those selections.
We’re actually going to create a variables here for client mac address. It’s important to understand that variables are only bound to the dashboard you create them in. If you create a separate dashboard for your client graphs, be sure to create the client-related variables on that dashboard.
To configure variables, click on the Gear button in the upper-right corner of the screen.
- Then click on Variale > New variable
- You have to add some details as mentioned below:
- After adding the variables, you can see all variables appearing on the dashboard as shown below:
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When creating the Docker Compose file, I configured a new bridge network and ensured all three Docker containers were placed within it, enabling automatic hostname resolution.
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I incorporated persistence volumes in Docker to ensure continuity of data even after server reboots or container restarts.
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If you opt not to map InfluxDB 2.x to InfluxQL, the query type will differ accordingly.
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When importing my Grafana dashboard, please remember to properly choose the following points as mentioned below:
1. WLAN ID 2. Radio SLOT ID 3. SSID 4. WLC interface 5. WLC Chassis id
https://developer.cisco.com/codeexchange/github/repo/jeremycohoe/cisco-ios-xe-mdt/
https://github.com/CiscoDevNet/yangsuite
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnd4KqeeqIw
https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/setup-grafana/installation/docker/