gNMI and you: The death of SNMP was greatly exagerated#

Tom Strickx, Cloudflare

• Why: Network observability is a core ops responsibility, and gNMI/OpenConfig is the leading SNMP replacement — but real production experience, including failures, is rarely shared. Cloudflare's honest accounting of what works and what still hurts is exactly the decision-support material needed before betting a monitoring stack on it.
• What: An introduction and comparison: gNMI (gRPC-based, OpenConfig YANG models, ProtoBuf, TLS required by default, pub/sub) versus SNMP (OID sprawl, ASN.1, plaintext by default, pull-plus-traps). Then the unvarnished problems: uneven vendor adoption ("your fridge probably ships with SNMP"), vendor inconsistency, and thin documentation. Production pain points include distributed counting (correctly counting events across a fleet is genuinely hard) and per-linecard counters on Juniper requiring monotonicity handling (Prometheus-style counter-reset adjustment).
• How: Cloudflare runs gNMIc (Nokia-developed, now OpenConfig-owned, actively maintained) with internal processors and an aggregation layer; the talk surveys the wider toolchain (gNMI-gateway, ExaRing's exporter, Telegraf with gNMI plugins) and notes which are unmaintained-but-working.
• Where applicable: Broadly applicable — the gNMI/SNMP comparison and tooling recommendations are vendor-neutral. The scale and some quirks are Cloudflare/Juniper-specific; vendor consistency caveats should be validated against your own fleet before migration.