CMTS - Cable Monitoring

Monitoring of Cable characteristics on CMTS was always a hard job. You had to either implement your CMTS to Cacti/Zabbix or create your own polling application. I would like to share with you how I made it easy with opensource tools freely available on the internet.

Benefits to rrd

• This is influxDB aka Big Data
• If you keep your fiber node descriptions intact you have the whole history even after segmentation
• Fancy dashboards with tables, gauges and piecharts
• View of the whole CMTS statistics on one page

Dashboard

Prerequirements

• InfluxDB
• Telegraf
• Grafana
• net-snmp

CMTS Configuration

InfluxDB is all about tags. Tags are used to query and also to display values in a propper way. In order for data to be displayed we need to set descriptions and hostname of the CMTS propperly.

Hostname

Name your CMTS something meaningful. My is called CMTS-Testlab-01.

hostname CMTS-Testlab-01

Fibernode

Give your fibernode also a meaningful description. My fibernode is called by street on which it's located.

cable fiber-node "FN1" 
 description "Street 1"

Upstreams

All upstream interfaces and subinterfaces connected to this fibernode must have exactly the same description as fibernode. Do this for all upstreams connected to this fibernode.

interface cable-upstream 11/3 
 description "Street 1"
interface cable-upstream 11/3.0
 description "Street 1"
interface cable-upstream 11/3.1
 description "Street 1"

Downstreams

As downstream interface can be connected to various fibernodes you need to have somekind of delimiter. I have chosen pipe "|" as the one. So let's say we have 2 fibernodes connected to one downstream. Than the description should look like: "|Street 1|Street 2|". Do this for all downstreams connected to this mac-domain.

interface cable-downstream 14/8 
 description "|Street 1|Street 2|"

Telegraf

Location of telegraf config files is "/etc/telegraf/telegraf.d/".

• CMTS_generic.conf should work with every single cmts. However it doesn't show CM counters as this is vendor specific.
• CMTS_Cisco.conf should work with Cisco CMTSes. It will show CM counters. Sadly it doesn't show Docsis 3.0 modems.
• CMTS_Casa.conf should work with Casa-Systems CMTSes. Also enviroment measurement is done.

Edit desired config, change IP and community. Copy config to telegraf config directory and reload telegraf service.

#cp CMTS_generic.conf /etc/telegraf/telegraf.d/CMTS_Testlab_01.conf 
#service telegraf reload

Grafana

Login to your grafana server: http://yourserver.ip:3000/ (admin/admin by default)

Add Data Source

Let's create data source called "telegraf".

()

Choose green button: Add data source

Save Data Source

Probably influxdb is running on the same server. Database is called "telegraf" and also data source should be called "telegraf".

()

Import Dashboard

• Slide over dashboard button and click on "Manage".

• On the right side click "Import". ()

• Click on green button "Upload .json File"

• Choose "CMTS - Cable.json" and click "Import".

You're Finished!