Cisco Model-Driven Telemetry and Zabbix

The Challenge

A customer wanted to retrieve information from their Cisco Access Points to be available in Zabbix. After some research, one implementation approach is:

Cisco Access Point → Telegraf → Zabbix

Telegraf supports Cisco Model-Driven Telemetry via the Cisco Model-Driven Telemetry (MDT) Input Plugin and Zabbix via the Zabbix Output Plugin.

But there was one little piece missing: Cisco MDT outputs extensive data, but not all messages include the hostname required for our Zabbix setup. A small tool was needed to bridge this gap. It searches incoming Cisco messages for entries containing both the MAC address and the hostname, stores this mapping, and enriches messages destined for Zabbix with the missing hostname information.

How It Works

One message containing mac and hostname:

Cisco-IOS-XE-wireless-access-point-oper:access-point-oper-data/capwap-data,host=myhost1,path=Cisco-IOS-XE-wireless-access-point-oper:access-point-oper-data/capwap-data,ap_mac=wifi-cat9800-01,subscription=290,wtp_mac=00:11:22:33:44:55 name="AP-Floor1-Room101",...

From this message we get the mapping mac=00:11:22:33:44:55 → name=AP-Floor1-Room101.

If after this a message with our wanted data comes in, we enrich it:

Incoming:

Cisco-IOS-XE-process-cpu-oper:cpu-usage,ap_mac=00:11:22:33:44:55,subscription=100 cpu_utilization=45.2 1733913600000000000

Transformed:

Cisco-IOS-XE-process-cpu-oper:cpu-usage,ap_mac=00:11:22:33:44:55,hostname=AP-Floor1-Room101,subscription=100,zabbix_export=true cpu_utilization=45.2 1733913600000000000

The enriched message will be used by the Zabbix Output Plugin as it contains the tag zabbix_export=true and the hostname=AP-Floor1-Room101 will be used to match the host in Zabbix.

Telegraf Configuration

The relevant parts of the configuration:

telegraf.conf:

[[inputs.cisco_telemetry_mdt]]
  transport = "grpc"
  service_address = ":57501"

# Lookup MAC to Hostname
[[processors.execd]]
  command = [
    "/opt/mit-cisco-telegraf-zabbix/.venv/bin/python",
    "/opt/mit-cisco-telegraf-zabbix/bin/mac_to_hostname.py",
    "/var/lib/telegraf/mac_to_hostname.csv",
    "/var/log/telegraf/mac_to_hostname.log"
  ]
  restart_delay = "10s"
  data_format = "influx"

[[outputs.zabbix]]
  ## Only output to Zabbix if tag is found
  tagpass = { zabbix_export = ["true"] }
  taginclude = ["hostname"]
  address = "zabbix.example.com:10051"
  # Zabbix trapper
  agent_active = false
  host_tag = "hostname"
  key_prefix = ""
  skip_measurement_prefix = true

You can find the script here: meissnerIT/cisco-mdt-zabbix.

Cisco  Telegraf  Zabbix  Monitoring