Automating Target Discovery in the gNMIc Operator#

Daniel Schatzmann

• Why: Streaming telemetry (gNMI) moving into Kubernetes, plus automatic synchronization with a source of truth — squarely in the PM's cloud-native networking and network-automation space. It's also a nice example of upstream-able operator work from a bachelor thesis at OST.
• What: An extension to the gNMIc Operator (open-source, started 2026) that removes the last manual step in gNMI telemetry: keeping the monitored-target list current. Targets are synchronized from an external source of truth (NetBox in the demo), closing the gap where the monitoring stack and the inventory drift apart.
• How: Two complementary mechanisms: periodic pull from NetBox via an export template, and event-driven push from NetBox via webhook — so inventory changes propagate to the collectors without human edits. The demo runs targets in Containerlab with a Prometheus/Grafana monitoring stack; the export template and webhook receiver have both been contributed as examples in the gNMIc Operator docs, and the mechanism is extensible to other sources of truth. (The work is a BSc thesis by Valentino Diller and Roman Weber at OST, supervised by Daniel Schatzmann.)
• Where applicable: Any team running gNMI/gNMIc — the operator itself is upstream and open, and the NetBox integration patterns ship in its documentation. General technique, not org-specific.