Arista LANZ and Elasticsearch Integration

Input and output integration overview

<p>The Arista LANZ plugin is designed for reading latency and congestion metrics from Arista LANZ, helping users monitor their network performance effectively.</p>

<p>The Telegraf Elasticsearch Plugin seamlessly sends metrics to an Elasticsearch server. The plugin handles template creation and dynamic index management, and supports various Elasticsearch-specific features to ensure data is formatted correctly for storage and retrieval.</p>

Integration details

Arista LANZ

<p>This plugin provides a consumer for use with Arista Networks’ Latency Analyzer (LANZ). Metrics are read from a stream of data via TCP through port 50001 on the switches management IP. The data is in Protobuffers format, allowing for efficient transportation and parsing of data. LANZ is utilized to monitor network latency and congestion in real-time, which is vital for maintaining optimal performance in networking environments. The underlying technology, Arista’s latency analysis, provides insights into various network operations and infrastructure behaviors, making it a crucial tool for network engineering and management.</p>

Elasticsearch

<p>This plugin writes metrics to Elasticsearch, a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine capable of storing large amounts of data in near real-time. It is designed to handle Elasticsearch versions 5.x through 7.x and utilizes its dynamic template features to manage data type mapping properly. The plugin supports advanced features such as template management, dynamic index naming, and integration with OpenSearch. It also allows configurations for authentication and health monitoring of the Elasticsearch nodes.</p>

Configuration

Arista LANZ

Elasticsearch

Input and output integration examples

Arista LANZ

<ol> <li> <p><strong>Real-Time Latency Monitoring</strong>: This plugin can be used to set up a monitoring dashboard that tracks real-time latency metrics across multiple interfaces. By gathering and visualizing this data, network admins can swiftly identify and rectify latency issues before they impact service quality. The challenge lies in efficiently handling the influx of metrics from various sources without overwhelming the infrastructure or incurring excessive processing delays.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Congestion Analysis for Traffic Engineering</strong>: Users can leverage the LANZ plugin to analyze congestion records, enabling the optimization of network traffic flows. By applying historical pattern recognition to the metrics collected, IT teams can make informed decisions on traffic management strategies, thus improving overall network efficiency. This requires implementing robust data storage and analysis capabilities to derive actionable insights from the raw metrics.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Integration with Alerting Systems</strong>: Integrate the metrics from this plugin with alerting systems to automatically notify network engineers of any significant changes in latency or congestion. By setting thresholds based on historical data trends, this use case enhances proactive incident management, allowing teams to address potential issues proactively. The technical challenge here is establishing the right balance in threshold settings to minimize false positives while ensuring genuine issues are flagged promptly.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Network Optimization Reports</strong>: Utilize the metrics gathered through the LANZ plugin to generate periodic reports that detail network performance, latency trends, and congestion events. These reports can help stakeholders understand network health over time and guide infrastructure investments. The challenge involves structuring and formatting the output data to make it comprehensible and actionable for various audiences.</p> </li> </ol>

Elasticsearch

<ol> <li> <p><strong>Time-based Indexing</strong>: Use this plugin to store metrics in Elasticsearch to index each metric based on the time collected. For example, CPU metrics can be stored in a daily index named<code>telegraf-2023.01.01</code>, allowing easy time-based queries and retention policies.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Dynamic Templates Management</strong>: Utilize the template management feature to automatically create a custom template tailored to your metrics. This allows you to define how different fields are indexed and analyzed without manually configuring Elasticsearch, ensuring an optimal data structure for querying.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>OpenSearch Compatibility</strong>: If you are using AWS OpenSearch, you can configure this plugin to work seamlessly by activating compatibility mode, ensuring your existing Elasticsearch clients remain functional and compatible with newer cluster setups.</p> </li> </ol>

Feedback

Thank you for being part of our community! If you have any general feedback or found any bugs on these pages, we welcome and encourage your input. Please submit your feedback in the InfluxDB community Slack.