EOS Methods - Weekend Fun Experiment

📖 Table of Contents

• 📄 Summary
• 📋 Steps
• 📍 Final Report
• ⚠️ Disclaimer

📄 Summary

Testing CLI/SSH, NETCONF, RESTCONF, gNMI, eAPI (and Telnet 😝) on Arista EOS.

Luckily, Arista provides us with the chance to download and test its OS for free, and on top of that EOS supports 5 data retrieval methods (+ Telnet, just for fun) necessary for network automation:

Method	Port	Transport	Data Format	Security
eAPI	443	HTTP/1.1 over TLS 1.3	JSON-RPC — native EOS schema	Encrypted (TLS 1.3)
RESTCONF	6020	HTTP/1.1 over TLS 1.3	JSON — YANG / OpenConfig	Encrypted (TLS 1.3)
gNMI	6030	gRPC over HTTP/2 over TLS 1.3	Protobuf / JSON — YANG / OpenConfig	Encrypted (TLS 1.3)
NETCONF	830	SSHv2 subsystem	XML — YANG / OpenConfig	Encrypted (SSHv2)
SSH/CLI	22	SSHv2	Plain text — CLI output	Encrypted (SSHv2)
Telnet/CLI	23	Telnet	Plain text — CLI output	None — plaintext

📋 Steps

• Have an Arista EOS device up and reachable
• See all the necessary EOS configs here
• Create a venv:

python3 -m venv arista
source arista/bin/activate

• Install requirements:

pip install -r requirements.txt

• Set your device's mgmt IP and credentials in arista.py
• Run the test once: python arista.py

============================================================
  Arista Switch -- 6-Method Concurrent Benchmark
  Target: 172.20.20.208
  Query : show interfaces status
============================================================

  Starting all 6 connections simultaneously...
  Methods: SSH/CLI | eAPI | RESTCONF | NETCONF | gNMI | Telnet

  All connections completed in 6.7608s (wall clock)

  Rank   Method                         Time (s)     Status
  ------------------------------------------------------------
  1      eAPI (HTTPS JSON-RPC)          0.0970       OK
  2      RESTCONF (HTTPS REST)          0.1100       OK
  3      gNMI (pygnmi/gRPC)             0.2340       OK
  4      SSH/CLI (Netmiko)              1.9670       OK
  5      NETCONF (ncclient)             2.2400       OK
  6      Telnet/CLI (Netmiko)           6.4440       OK

  Full report written to: notes/arista_benchmark_results.txt

• Run RUNS = 500 tests, get the average: python benchmark_runner.py

  Completed 500 runs

  Rank   Method                         Avg Time (s)   Success Rate
  -----------------------------------------------------------------
  1      eAPI (HTTPS JSON-RPC)          0.0990         500/500
  2      RESTCONF (HTTPS REST)          0.1178         500/500
  3      gNMI (pygnmi/gRPC)             0.2641         500/500
  4      SSH/CLI (Netmiko)              1.9690         500/500
  5      NETCONF (ncclient)             2.3410         500/500
  6      Telnet/CLI (Netmiko)           6.4105         500/500

• Query outputs are saved to notes/arista_benchmark_results.txt
• You can also run Wireshark to see more details (GEEK!)
  • Use the filters provided here
  • Or check out the PCAPs in pcaps/

Have fun! 🤓

📍 Final Report

• See the full REPORT.md
• ... or just REPORT_TLDR.md

⚠️ Disclaimer

Lab context: Results are from an Arista cEOS 4.35.0F lab in containerlab, client and device on the same local subnet. Rankings and absolute times may differ on physical EOS hardware (which supports gNMI encoding="proto", reducing gNMI's response size significantly), over WAN or high-latency links, with TACACS+/RADIUS authentication (adds network RTT to every SSH/NETCONF connection), on different EOS versions, or with other vendors.

Educational purposes only. License MIT.