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App Overview

This document provides an overview of the App including critical information and important considerations when applying it to your Nautobot environment.

Note

Throughout this documentation, the terms "app" and "plugin" will be used interchangeably.

Description

The Nautobot NetObs App currently has main functionality to:

  • Allow organizations to easily maintain and extend their network observability platform by generating Telegraf configuration via models instead of Jinja templates.
  • Providing operational capabilities to backup alerts and dashboards.
  • Providing a way to easily create Prometheus info metrics.
Info Metrics

Info metrics are additional metrics that provide more labels to help with visualization and alerting.

The Nautobot NetObs Library provides app users with consistent and tested Telegraf configurations making it easier to add new vendors.

Audience (User Personas) - Who should use this App?

  • Organizations that want to include telemetry collection as part of their source of truth.
  • Network Engineers that would like to streamline collecting telemetry data from devices.
  • Observability Engineers that want to incorporate Nautobot data as Prometheus info metrics.
  • Observability Engineers that want to backup Mimir and Loki alerts along with Grafana dashboards.

NetObs Components

Nautobot Features Used

The Nautobot NetObs App heavily utilizes Dynamic Groups to provide the templated system configuration.

Extras

Git Data

The Nautobot NetObs App adds 2 new Git Data types:

  • NetObs Library. This is a repo that contains common components of Telegraf (schemas, plugin groups, JSON data, templates).
  • Telegraf Generated Configs. This is the repo where the Telegraf Nautobot Pipeline Job and Job Hook will write Telegraf agent configurations to.
  • NetObs Server Backups. This is a repo where NetObs Servers can be backed up to.

Jobs and Job Hook Receivers

The Nautobot NetObs App provides 4 jobs and 1 job hook receiver.

Import NetObs Library

Imports common items for Telegraf (schemas, plugin groups, JSON data, templates) and Prometheus (metrics and metric labels) from NetObs Library.

Export NetObs Library

Exports common items for Telegraf (schemas, plugin groups, JSON data, templates) and Prometheus (metrics and metric labels) from NetObs Library.

Add Agent to Telegraf Agent Group

This allows bulk additions of agents to a Telegraf Agent Group. This makes it easier when scaling up Telegraf environments.

Telegraf Nautobot Pipeline

Manually run the Telegraf Pipeline to assign devices to agents, generate Telegraf agent configurations, and (optionally) write Telegraf agent configurations and Telegraf templates to a Git repository.

Telegraf Nautobot Pipeline Job Hook

This does the same as the Telegraf Nautobot Pipeline job but does it in an automated way when a change is made to a device.

Prometheus Metric Sync

Creates and updates Prometheus Metrics for all the Devices and Interfaces.

Prometheus Metric Job Hook Receiver

This does the same as the Prometheus Metric Sync job but in an automated way when a change is made to a device or interface.