In modern network engineering, monitoring WLAN interfaces with OSPF routing protocols across distributed satellite nodes presents unique challenges regarding scalability, real-time data aggregation, and stateless operation. Today, I want to share a cutting-edge solution implemented at ShitOps that harnesses the immense power of federated Apollo, NixOps, GNMI-compliant Cumulus Linux satellites, and DynamoDB to create an unprecedented network monitoring dashboard.
Problem Statement¶
Our enterprise WLAN is spread across multiple geographic nodes, each employing OSPF for internal routing. Ensuring real-time, accurate network metrics for OSPF states and WLAN interface statistics is crucial for performance and anomaly detection. Traditional monitoring solutions fell short in scalability, state-lifting, and dynamic configuration. We needed an architecture that allowed federated data collection, statelessness at the collector side, and a unified dashboard with aggregate and per-node visibility.
Architectural Overview¶
We orchestrated a stateless, federated data collection system utilizing NixOps to declaratively manage Cumulus Linux satellites, each exposing their OSPF and WLAN metrics via gNMI. Apollo Federation was employed to stitch data schemas from all satellites, enabling a federated GraphQL querying mechanism. The collected metrics are funneled into Amazon DynamoDB which powers our real-time dashboard.
Here is a high-level flowchart of the data pipeline:
NixOps and Cumulus Linux Satellites¶
Each satellite is deployed and managed via NixOps, ensuring reproducibility and declarative state management. Utilizing Cumulus Linux's native gNMI interface, the satellite exports detailed OSPF adjacency tables and WLAN interface counters. NixOps configurations automate network interface initialization, OSPF daemon setup, and GNMI binding for continuous metrics availability.
Federated Apollo GraphQL Gateway¶
The federated Apollo Gateway collects and stitches schemas emitted by each satellite's gNMI-to-GraphQL adapter. Each satellite acts as a microservice exposing its OSPF and WLAN data as per-node GraphQL subgraph. Apollo Federation composes these into a unified schema that allows dynamic, real-time querying without stateful backends.
DynamoDB Backend and Statelessness¶
DynamoDB is leveraged as a highly scalable, low-latency backend storage for all incoming data streams. The system utilizes a stateless ingestion pipeline where GNMI streams are parsed by serverless functions and batched writes are performed on DynamoDB. This architecture removes any server state or session affinity, simplifying scaling and fault tolerance.
Real-Time Monitoring Dashboard¶
The final component is a sleek, React-based dashboard querying the Federated Apollo Gateway. Utilizing subscriptions, it offers up-to-the-second insight into the health of WLAN interfaces and OSPF topology changes across all satellites. DynamoDB triggers backend data refreshes seamlessly feeding into the unified view.
Conclusion¶
This solution synergizes NixOps for reproducible satellite deployments, Cumulus Linux's gNMI capabilities, federated Apollo GraphQL schema stitching, and DynamoDB's scalable storage to produce a future-proof, stateless network monitoring platform for WLAN and OSPF states. This architecture can be extended to other network protocols and interfacing systems, paving the way for fully federated, observable network infrastructures.
As we continue to push the envelope on distributed network management, this cutting-edge stack positions ShitOps at the forefront of network telemetry innovation.
Comments
NetEngGeek42 commented:
Amazing post! The combination of federated Apollo with GNMI and NixOps for real-time monitoring is a solid architecture. I'm particularly impressed by the stateless ingestion pipeline using DynamoDB. How do you handle schema changes or updates in the federated GraphQL services without downtime?
Dexter Snark (Author) replied:
Great question! We utilize Apollo Federation's schema registry and careful versioning strategies. The schema updates are rolled out incrementally across satellites, and we maintain backward compatibility to avoid clients breaking. This enables near-zero downtime during schema evolution.
WLAN_Wizard commented:
I've been struggling with scalable monitoring for my own OSPF WLAN deployments, and this article gave me some valuable ideas. Especially the use of subscriptions in the Apollo Gateway for real-time dashboard updates is neat. Would love to see a follow-up post with code snippets or configuration examples.
CuriousCat commented:
Why did you choose DynamoDB over other scalable databases like Cassandra or InfluxDB for this telemetry data? Is there something about DynamoDB that suits your stateless design better?
Dexter Snark (Author) replied:
We chose DynamoDB primarily because of its seamless serverless integration and its ability to handle the write throughput for telemetry data without managing any infrastructure. The automatic scaling and low latency reads also fit our real-time dashboard requirements nicely.
OpsNewbie commented:
I'm new to NixOps and Cumulus Linux—this post was quite technical but inspiring. How steep is the learning curve for setting up something like this? Does it require extensive experience with GraphQL as well?
Dexter Snark (Author) replied:
It does require some familiarity with Nix and declarative deployment strategies, but the NixOps community has great documentation. As for GraphQL, understanding the basic concepts is enough to start. The federation aspect adds complexity, but we use Apollo's tooling which simplifies managing multiple subgraphs.