Category Archives: SNMP

Junos Telemetry

Hi All

Recently I attended a Juniper workshop in their London office and heard about Junos Telemetry concept which was really a new one for me and I quite liked it.

The basic idea is to replace traditional methods of collecting the data from devices on Management stations which helps Operations teams in more automated solution for managing their vast networks.

Traditional method which I am talking about here is SNMP which works on Pull model where Management station polls the network devices to gather useful information using MIBs and in turn displays the data to Network Admins/Operations Team. This method is being used currently and have succeed a lot. However as Hardware vendors are providing more and more APIs in their products which can be used by users to configure their devices in lots of innovative ways, polling or gather statistics via SNMP is not scalable in those scenario. Also SNMP polls the devices at regular interval which is again an operational challenge as something can happen on device between the intervals which wont be captured.

Junos Telemetry or Telemetry concept in general provides a Push model where we can configure the device to send the real time data based upon any trigger or in general for various parameters. 


  Source: Juniper Networks

In this blog, we are not going to see how its configured in CLI but who knows when I can get hold of appropriate Junos code and have a play on it 🙂 but till then let’s see what are its other features.

Junos Telemetry interface (JIT) as I mentioned above works on Push model where it streams the results to collector or even to Controller like Northstar to drive MPLS LSPs. Format of data what is being sent is either in form of Google Protocol buffer GPB or can be JSON based.

Juniper provides the collector software however there are open source collectors as well called OpenNTI collector which is basically a docker container consisting of 3 open-source components.

Shown below is one of the Visualization chart using Grafana,


From application point of view, i think its one of the application could be to re-route the LSPs or create a LSP from Northstar Controller based upon the bandwidth statistics from interface. Once interface statistics reported to collector exceeds certain threshholds, Application can instruct Northstar controller to create a LSP via other route which can in long term works towards Self Driving Networks.

Other Application could be to provide more user-friendly stats about routers/network device to Operations like Memory, CPU usage in environment where thousands of routes or control packets are going via routers and memory hog can be created because of this.

Junos Telemetry Interface was introduced in Junos OS Release 15.1F3, on MX Series routers with interfaces configured on MPC1 through MPC6E, and on PTX Series routers with interfaces configured on FPC3.

So that’s all for Telemetry. I haven’t added much details on this as this is really a new concept for me and as n when I read more about it or get a chance to do hand-on on it, I will write more. Let me know your views on it and if you have used or planning to use this in your network.





How to find SNMP OID in JunOS

Before we got into that, lets see what is SNMP?



SNMP consists of

SNMP Manager:

A manager or management system is a separate entity that is responsible to communicate with the SNMP agent implemented network devices. This is typically a computer that is used to run one or more network management systems.

Managed Devices:

A managed device or the network element is a part of the network that requires some form of monitoring and management e.g. routers, switches, servers, workstations, printers, UPSs, etc…

SNMP Agent:

The agent is a program that is packaged within the network element. Enabling the agent allows it to collect the management information database from the device locally and makes it available to the SNMP manager, when it is queried for. These agents could be standard (e.g. Net-SNMP) or specific to a vendor (e.g. HP insight agent)

Every SNMP agent maintains an information database describing the managed device parameters. The SNMP manager uses this database to request the agent for specific information and further translates the information as needed for the Network Management System (NMS). This commonly shared database between the Agent and the Manager is called Management Information Base (MIB).

In other words, MIB files are the set of questions that a SNMP Manager can ask the agent. Agent collects these data locally and stores it, as defined in the MIB. So, the SNMP Manager should be aware of these standard and private questions for every type of agent.

Management Information Base (MIB) is a collection of Information for managing network element. The MIBs comprises of managed objects identified by the name Object Identifier (Object ID or OID).

A typical object ID will be a dotted list of integers. For example, the OID in RFC1213 for “sysDescr” is .


Now the real question…how to find the SNMP OID corresponds to SNMP Object name in Junos?

For that firstly, we need to find the exact object name

Lets say we have to check the OID corresponding to BGP AS, in this we can either give the command as following:

show snmp mib walk 1 | match bgp

This will be give us number of results however if we already know the object name then we can match that specific name. Currently I don’t know so I just mentioned bgp and it gave me lots of output.

RE-1> show snmp mib walk 1 | match bgp

bgpVersion.0 = 10

bgpLocalAs.0 = 65004

bgpPeerIdentifier. =

bgpPeerIdentifier. =

bgpPeerIdentifier. =

bgpPeerIdentifier. =

bgpPeerIdentifier. =

bgpPeerIdentifier. =




I can see one of the output is bgpLocalAs.0 which is I am after, so lets see how we can get the OID corresponding to it.

RE-1> show snmp mib walk bgpLocalAs | display xml
<rpc-reply xmlns:junos="">
    <snmp-object-information xmlns="">

Here it is , so we got the OID and you can use this OID in NMS systems to poll this specific object.