netspryte is a library and set of utilities to query network equipment and get structured data back that describes the device.

You will need docker and docker-compose to install netspryte. Please refer to documentation on installing these packages.

• Getting started with Docker on Fedora
• Docker on Debian
• Install Docker
• Install Docker Compose

For docker-compose, it should be enough to do a pip install docker-compose. See Install using pip for details.

Netspryte is intended to be deployed using containers. The included docker-compoose.yml file will launch three services:

• collector - This will poll devices and collect data.
• web - The web frontend.
• database - Where collected information is stored. Note this is not the metrics themselves.

Before you start the services, you should look at the file netspryte.params and consider where you want the measurement data to be stored. You should update the variables CONTAINER_DATADIR and CONTAINER_CONFIGDIR. The variable CONTAINER_DATADIR defines what local path to use as a volume for where RRDs will be stored. The variable CONTAINER_CONFIGDIR defines the local path to use as a volume for configuration data.

To start the services:

make start

While the normal jobs will take care of initializing the database, you can also do this directly:

make initdb

This will start all the services. To stop:

make stop

At this time, you can jump down to the section on configuration and start collecting data.

If you wish, you can build the containers yourself. If you also choose to push the images to hub.docker.com, be sure to update the variables COLLECTOR_IMAGE_NAME and WEB_IMAGE_NAME.

To build the containers:

make build

You can then optionally make push if you have defined a new image name and tag.

The following are possible issues you might run into when deploying the containers.

If you plan to deploy this on a SELinux enabled system, you may have to add the :z flag to the $CONTAINER_DBDIR, $CONTAINER_CONFIGDIR, and $CONTAINER_DATADIR volume mounts in docker-compose.yml. For example:

web:
  image: $WEB_IMAGE_NAME:$IMAGE_TAG
  container_name: $WEB_CONTAINER_NAME
  restart: $RESTART_POLICY
  ports:
    - "80:80"
  volumes:
    - $CONTAINER_CONFIGDIR:/etc/netspryte:z
    - $CONTAINER_DATADIR:/var/lib/netspryte/data:z

For more information, see:

• https://www.projectatomic.io/blog/2015/06/using-volumes-with-docker-can-cause-problems-with-selinux/

The default database host is defined as localhost. You will likely want to update this to the hostname where the database container is run. This allows you to run the web and collector containers on different hosts.

Review netspryte.cfg for what is configurable. The list of devices to poll is defined by devices in the general section.

Once you have configured the list of devices to poll, it is time to set up the collector to poll your devices. This can be done with:

make cron-add

You can review the crontab with:

make cron-show