NATS

gnmic supports exporting subscription updates to multiple NATS servers/clusters simultaneously

A NATS output can be defined using the below format in gnmic config file under outputs section:

outputs:
  output1:
    type: nats # required
    address: localhost:4222 # comma separated NATS servers
    subject-prefix: telemetry # this prefix is used to to build the subject name for each target/subscription
    subject: telemetry # if a subject-prefix is not specified, gnmic will publish all subscriptions updates to a single subject 'telemetry'
    username: # NATS username
    password: # NATS password  
    connect-time-wait: # wait time before reconnection attempts

Using subject config value a user can specify the NATS subject to which to send all subscriptions updates for all targets

If a user wants to separate updates by targets and by subscriptions, subject-prefix can be used. if subject-prefix is specified subject is ignored.

gnmic takes advantage of NATS subject hierarchy by publishing gNMI subscription updates to a separate subject per target per subscription.

The NATS subject name is built out of the subject-prefix, name under the target definition and subscription-name resulting in the following format: subject-prefix.name.subscription-name

e.g: for a target router1, a subscription name port-stats and subject-prefix telemetry the subject name will be telemetry.router1.port-stats

If the target name is an IP address, or a hostname (meaning potentially contains .), the . characters are replaced with a -

e.g: for a target 172.17.0.100:57400, the previous subject name becomes telemetry.172-17-0-100:57400.port-stats

This way a user can subscribe to different subsets of updates by tweaking the subject name:

• "telemetry.>" gets all updates sent to NATS by all targets, all subscriptions
• "telemetry.router1.>" gets all NATS updates for target router1
• "telemetry.*.port-stats" gets all updates from subscription port-stats, for all targets