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Network Monitoring with the gNMIc Operator#

CHNUG #4 digest Program Core pick 26 August 2026

Slides Recording

Speakers: Roman Weber (OST Students), Valentino Diller (OST Students)

Play the recording: Network Monitoring with the gNMIc Operator

  • Why: Streaming telemetry (gNMI) is the successor to SNMP polling for anyone operating DC fabrics and cloud infrastructure, but the operational gap has always been the collector: hand-edited config files, no HA, and no live sync with the network source of truth. This addresses that gap with a Kubernetes-native pattern the PM already lives in.
  • What: A bachelor thesis project from OST (Ostschweizer Fachhochschule) that packages gNMIc — the open-source gNMI CLI/collector — as a Kubernetes Operator, adding declarative configuration, high availability, a constant reconciliation loop, and automatic target discovery. Open-sourced in 2026.
  • How: The operator subscribes to YANG paths via gNMI (gRPC-based, OpenConfig) so the router pushes data on its own schedule instead of being polled. Target auto-discovery closes the "synchronization gap" between the network source of truth and the monitoring stack: target info is pulled from a SoT via export templates, or pushed via webhook. The demo ran targets in containerlab, with Prometheus/Grafana as the monitoring stack and NetBox as the SoT — both the pull and webhook examples ship in the operator docs.
  • Where applicable: Broadly applicable — anyone running gNMIc on Kubernetes with a NetBox-class SoT. Note the maturity level: this is a brand-new (2026) open-source project born from a student thesis, so treat it as promising tooling to evaluate rather than battle-hardened production software.