Table of Content

• Introduction
• Deployment options
  • Standalone binary with mdt-dialout-collector
  • Library/Header integration with pmtelemetryd
• Install
  • Building from source
• References

Introduction

mdt-dialout-collector & gRPC dial-out libraries are leveraging the gRPC Framework to implement a multi-vendor gRPC Dial-out collector. The doc/Changelog file is including additional details about the supported network devices.

The collector functionalities can be logically grouped into three categories:

1. Data Collection - they are steering the daemon(s) behavior.
2. Data Manipulation - they are conveniently transforming the in-transit data-stream.
3. Data Delivery - they are inter-connecting the collector with the next stage in the pipeline.

The doc/CONFIG-KEYS file is including the description for each one of the available options.

Additional capabilities:

• IPv4 and IPv6 listening sockets (socket_<vendor> keys accept both 0.0.0.0:port and [::]:port / [2001:db8::1]:port). The legacy ipv4_socket_<vendor> keys remain honored as deprecated aliases.
• Server-side TLS on every vendor's gRPC port (enable_tls, tls_cert_path, tls_key_path). Off by default — existing configs keep working unchanged.
• Graceful shutdown in library mode via the stop_grpc_dialout_collector(void) C symbol exported by libgrpc_collector — drains in-flight RPCs and joins all worker threads.
• End-to-end test harness under tests/e2e/ (synthetic per-vendor gRPC clients + redpanda + the collector under podman). bash tests/e2e/run.sh runs the standalone path; --pmtelemetryd runs the library path; --tls runs the TLS path; --ipv6 runs against an IPv6 listening socket; --next runs against the latest gRPC/Protobuf stack.

Deployment options

The gRPC dial-out data-collection functionality can be deployed in two ways:

Standalone binary with mdt-dialout-collector

              +------------------------------------------------------+
+---------+   | +------------+   +--------------+   +--------------+ |   +---------+
| network |-->| | collection |-->| manipulation |-->| kafka client | |-->| kafka   |
+---------+   | +------------+   +--------------+   +--------------+ |   | cluster |
              |              [mdt-dialout-collector]                 |   +---------+
              +------------------------------------------------------+

the building process is generating a single binary:

/opt/mdt-dialout-collector/bin/mdt_dialout_collector

which, by default, is reading the running options from:

/etc/opt/mdt-dialout-collector/mdt_dialout_collector.conf

Additionally, the default configuration file can be further specified via the following command line:

/opt/mdt-dialout-collector/bin/mdt_dialout_collector -f <file.conf>

Library/Header integration with pmtelemetryd

              +---------------------------------------------------------+
+---------+   | +------------+   +--------------+   +-----------------+ |   +------------+
| network |-->| | collection |-->| manipulation |-->| ZMQ (PUSH/PULL) | |-->| pipeline   |
+---------+   | +------------+   +--------------+   +-----------------+ |   | next stage |
              |                    [pmtelemetryd]                       |   +------------+
              +---------------------------------------------------------+

the building process is generating both the library and the header file required to build pmtelemetryd with gRPC dial-out support:

/usr/local/lib/libgrpc_collector.la

/usr/local/include/grpc_collector_bridge/grpc_collector_bridge.h

there is one main pmtelemetryd CONFIG-KEYS which is mandatory in order to enable the embedded gRPC dial-out collector:

KEY:     telemetry_daemon_grpc_collector_conf
DESC:    Points to a file containing the configuration of the gRPC collector thread. An
         example of the configuration plus all available config keys is available here:
         https://github.com/network-analytics/mdt-dialout-collector
DEFAULT: none

Install

Native packages (.deb for Debian / Ubuntu, .rpm for Fedora) are built per release by the release.yml GitHub Actions workflow and attached to each GitHub Release. Two flavors per distro:

• mdt-dialout-collector — standalone daemon (binary, systemd unit, example config, man page).
• mdt-dialout-collector-lib — library variant for pmacct/pmtelemetryd integration (libgrpc_collector.so + C bridge header + pkg-config file).

Both link against the distro's own gRPC; apt/dnf resolves the rest of the runtime deps automatically.

# Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt install ./mdt-dialout-collector_<version>_<distro>_amd64.deb

# Fedora
sudo dnf install ./mdt-dialout-collector-<version>-1.fc<release>.x86_64.rpm

sudo $EDITOR /etc/opt/mdt-dialout-collector/mdt_dialout_collector.conf
sudo systemctl enable --now mdt-dialout-collector

Prefer a container? Pull the latest image from Docker Hub:

docker pull scuzzilla/mdt-dialout-collector:latest        # standalone daemon
docker pull scuzzilla/mdt-dialout-collector-lib:latest    # library variant (FROM-base for pmtelemetryd builds)

Full install matrix (including the container run/mount recipe) and post-install steps: doc/INSTALL.md. On-line reference: man mdt_dialout_collector after install.

Building from source

For developers and for distros not in the release matrix, see doc/INSTALL-FROM-SOURCE.md. The legacy install.sh is preserved as a developer convenience but is no longer the recommended install path.

References

• Integration with PMACCT/pmtelemetryd
• Network devices configuration snippets
• Multivendor (async) gRPC dial-out collector - APNIC Blog