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Management Protocols

Overview

ssh (CLI)

eAPI

gRPC

gRPC is a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) framework that OpenConfig utilizes as a transport. Services built with gRPC are defined in .proto files. They describe the RPCs supported by the service and the data types exchanged in those RPCs.

The OpenConfig group originally published openconfig.proto, but have since deprecated it in favor of gnmi.proto. The current EOS versions supports gnmi.proto v0.7 and includes support for Get, Subscribe, Set, and Capabilities RPCs.

Note: Support for openconfig.proto was dropped in EOS-4.23.0F+.

A client application is required to communicate with a gRPC service. A sample application can be found on the Arista GitHub account: gnmi. gnmi is a simple command-line client for gNMI written in Go that can be used for testing and prototyping.

Another popular gnmi client is gnmic.

NETCONF

NETCONF provides mechanisms to install, manipulate and delete the configuration of network devices. It uses eXtensible Markup Language (XML) based data encoding for the configuration data as well as protocol messages. The NETCONF protocol operations are realized as RPCs over ssh transport.

RESTCONF

References / Resources