Overview
Sensor Collector is the data collection component for Crosswork Assurance. It accepts data from Assurance Sensors and/or Telemetry Collectors and securely transmits the data to the Crosswork Assurance platform, which can be deployed either in the customer environment or in the cloud. Sensor Collector can be deployed in either Docker or Kubernetes environments.
Modes of Operation
You can configure a Sensor Collector to work in several different modes:
Gateway
- Sensor Agents and Telemetry Collectors securely connect to the Gateway Sensor Collector and stream performance monitoring data.
- Sensor Collector securely transmits the data to Cisco Crosswork Assurance.
CSV
- CSV Sensor Collector watches a directory for CSV files and, upon arrival, parses and uploads them.
- This is the method used for hardware Assurance Sensors.
Scraper (Supported but Not Recommended)
- Polls an external data source at a defined interval, transforms data, and uploads it to Cisco Crosswork Assurance.
- Can be used with any open-source Openmetric exporter (e.g., snmp-exporter).
- The flexibility of Telegraf embedded in Telemetry Collector with the Gateway Sensor Collector has replaced this Scraper mode as the recommended mode for ingestion of telemetry, but Scraper mode remains supported.
SNMP Alert Forwarder
- In addition to its primary role as a data collection component, you can configure Sensor Collector to act in an "outbound" capacity for the platform as an SNMP threshold alert forwarder.
- You can configure Sensor Collector to listen for threshold alerts in Crosswork Assurance, convert them to SNMP events/traps, and forward them to a given destination.
- Learn More: How to Provision Sensor Collector in SNMP Alert Forwarding Mode
System Requirements
Compute sizing and capacity guidance:
System requirements:
Sensor Collector Calculations: Rate and Delta Metrics
Sensor Collector can pass along metrics exactly as a device or sensor reports them, without modification. These are pass-through metrics. Additionally, advanced users can configure a custom Sensor Collector to calculate rate and delta metrics. Cisco CX Engineering must deliver these custom calculations.
Example of Rate and Delta Metrics
A rate shows how quickly a value changes over a specific period of time. For example, a network interface transmitting 60 megabytes in 10 seconds has a rate of 6 megabytes per second. A delta shows the difference between two measurements. If the interface has transmitted 60 megabytes and then transmits 120 megabytes over the next 10 second reporting period, the delta is 60 megabytes. Together, these metrics show both the total amount of data transferred and the speed of the transfer.
A Sensor Collector that calculates rate and delta metrics requires more compute resources than a Sensor Collector that simply processes pass-through metrics. Refer to the Sensor Collector Compute Requirements for full details.
High Availability
The Sensor Collector High Availability feature is only available in the Kubernetes environment, not the Docker environment. This feature provides node-level resiliency so that if a node fails, Kubernetes native self-monitoring capabilities monitor and react to the failure, automatically bringing Sensor Collector back up on a healthy node. See the Kubernetes deployment instructions to enable High Availability. Configure the cluster as described in this article.
Configuration
Configuration instructions are provided in this article:
Deployment
Installation guides are available for both Docker and Kubernetes environments:
Inventory of Sensor Collectors
The Crosswork Assurance user interface displays all configured Sensor Collectors, from which you can download them for initial deployment or upgrades.
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