Monitoring Orchestrator and EdgeConnect appliances

Integration of HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN into various IT & OSS/BSS systems can span a number of different functional areas, depending on what type of integration, automation, or aggregation is desired. Below is a table that describes various integration use cases and the recommended integration points, based on what the API was designed for.

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Best Practice: Retrieve statistics from EdgeConnect appliances directly!

The HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution generates volumes of statistics every minute. These statistics help us debug SD-WAN networks. Other network devices generate orders of magnitude less data per device. This disparity is partly due to the meshing capabilities of EdgeConnect and the collection of data on every tunnel. The other factor is the frequency at which data is collected. HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect products produce statistics every minute while the industry standard is generally every five minutes.

While the HPE Aruba Networking Orchestrator is the main consumer of this data and uses it extensively in reporting and troubleshooting, there are many situations where customers will need to access these statistics. The use cases for statistics range substantially and can span anything from integration with diagnostic tools to external reporting tools, to the development of customized health dashboards.

Orchestrator offers a REST API with access to these statistics, but to ensure the best Orchestrator UI user experience for SD-WAN administrators, it is not recommended to retrieve statistics directly from the Orchestrator API. Orchestrator is not designed for supporting these use cases and thus, not the right integration point.

The REST API is not suited for high-frequency polling of granular statistics or “data replication” into an external data store for two reasons: 1) the volume of data that is requested scales linearly with the number of EdgeConnect devices and the granularity of the requested statistics, and 2) Orchestrator does not have the resources for the load that frequent REST API calls would impose. Orchestrator serves multiple purposes and has limited resources tuned to do many functions, including:

• Supporting 5-50 concurrent users accessing the UI
• Orchestrating policies across the SD-WAN fabric with 2 to 1,000 devices
• Collecting and reporting statistics from these devices for Orchestrator users
• Servicing third-party API requests from external systems

Collecting and reporting statistics consumes large amounts of CPU and memory resources. Since Orchestrator is not designed to provide end applications with a copy of its statistics, HPE Aruba Networking provides REST APIs that allow customers to obtain this data directly from the appliances for use by third-party applications. This approach is required when the use case calls for access to fine-grained statistics and/or frequent access to the statistics and avoids overloading Orchestrator by distributing the load across the SD-WAN.

Pre-Requisites

Before collecting statistics using the EdgeConnect REST APIs, the following prerequisite must be met:

1. Appliance access: To access the EdgeConnect REST APIs directly, customers must have an up-to-date list of appliances and a method to access their REST API endpoints. The list of appliances and their configuration information can be retrieved from the Orchestrator REST API as part of inventory discovery.

2. Resource name or ID: Depending on which resource the customer is interested in (for example, tunnels, interfaces, flows, and so on), the identity of that resource needs to be known. This can be obtained from the Orchestrator REST API as part of the inventory discovery. The resource's ID or name is used to identify and associate the statistics in the files.

3. Login access to EdgeConnect gateways: File retrieval from EdgeConnect requires login access to EdgeConnect to ensure authorized access. HPE Aruba Networking recommends that customers create or orchestrate an "api-user" login on the edgeConnect appliances for use by the third-party application that is retrieving the files.

Overview of file retrieval methodology

To use EdgeConnect statistics in an external application, one can poll each appliance directly using REST APIs. The following steps outline how to do this.

1. Invoke the EdgeConnect REST API to determine which statistics files are available. EdgeConnect stores a fixed number of statistics files. The REST API call provides information about the time range that is currently available.

2. Request the stats file for the minute(s) of interest. The stats files are zipped. Information about which stats are contained in each file is described in the examples.

3. Store the files of interest and parse or ingest them as needed. The file formats for various statistics files are described in the examples.