TOI Author :: Dylan Walsh

gNPSI is an OpenConfig protocol designed to act as a proxy between the sFlow agent and interested gRPC clients. The gNPSI server receives datagrams from sFlow, repackages the datagrams in the protobuf message format and forwards these messages onto any subscribed gRPC clients. The protobuf used for this feature is available at the link above.

Before this feature was introduced, any daemon agent needing to interface with Sysdb for configuration retrieval and status updates had to go through the agent manager within the EOS SDK. Usage of the EOS SDK introduced various ABI issues due to constraints on which compiler, libc and kernel versions the daemon must be built with. This feature offers an alternative mechanism via gRPC, providing more flexibility in how daemon executables are built and used to programmatically interact with and monitor the EOS device.

EosSdkRpc is an agent built on top of the Arista EOS SDK. It uses gRPC as a mechanism to provide remote access to the EOS SDK. The gRPC interface that EosSdkRpc supports closely matches the interface provided by EOS SDK, and the intent is that the .proto interface can be publicly supported. EosSdkRpc allows for remote access and using protobuf to specify the interface isolates user code from the Linux ABI issues that come with building C++ applications on different compiler, libc, and kernel versions. EosSdkRpc is built using C++ but supports clients written in any of the languages currently supported by the gRPC framework.