RPMs for the third-party applications have the following guidelines and limitations:

• Starting with Cisco NX-OS Release 9.2(1), the Cisco repository where agents are stored is now located at https://devhub.cisco.com/artifactory/open-nxos/9.2.1/. All RPMs hosted in this repository are signed with the release key.

• The NX-OS 10.1(1) release has a new operating system and rootfs, based on NX-Linux(Cisco's proprietary Linux distribution), so third-party RPMs that were built using WRL5/WRL8 might not be compatible with NX-Linux, so the third-party software might not work. In this case, remove old versions of your apps used with previous releases and replace them with new software that is compatible with NX-Linux, which is available in the repository at https://devhub.cisco.com/artifactory/open-nxos/10.1.1/.

• Guidelines and instructions for installing signed RPMs are provided in the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series NX-OS Software Upgrade and Downgrade Guide, Release 9.2(x), including DNF and VSH CLI options for managing RPMs, signed and nonsigned RPM installations, the clean-up of repositories, and so on.

• The third-party applications are started during switch startup. It is possible that a third-party application could be started before its communication interface is up, or before the routing between the switch and any communication peer or server is established. Therefore, all third-party applications should be written to be robust in case of communication failure, and the application should retry establishing the connection. If an application is not resilient in the presence of a communication failure, a “wrapper” application might be required to establish that any communication peer is reachable before starting the desired application, or restart the desired application if necessary.

For more information about NX-API REST API object model specifications, see https://developer.cisco.com/media/dme/index.html

For DevOps configuration management tools, refer to the following links:

• Ansible 2.0 Release(Nexus Support), Ansible Release Index

• Ansible NX-OS Sample Modules, Ansible NX-OS Sample Modules

• Puppet, Puppet Forge Cisco Puppet

• Cisco Puppet Module(Git), Cisco Network Puppet Module

• Chef, Chef Supermarket Cisco Cookbook

• Cisco Chef Cookbook(Git), Cisco Network Chef Cookbook

To download a virtual Nexus 9000 switch, for an ESX5.1/5.5, VirtualBox, Fusion, and KVM, go to https://software.cisco.com/portal/pub/download/portal/select.html?&mdfid=286312239&flowid=81422&softwareid=282088129.

For a free book on Open NX-OS architecture and automation, see http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/nexus9000/sw/open_nxos/programmability/guide/Programmability_Open_NX-OS.pdf

collectd is a daemon that periodically collects system performance statistics and provides multiple means to store the values, such as RRD files. Those statistics can then be used to find current performance bottlenecks (for example, performance analysis) and predict future system load (that is, capacity planning).

For additional information, see https://collectd.org.

Ganglia is a scalable distributed monitoring system for high-performance computing systems such as clusters and grids. It is based on a hierarchical design that is targeted at federations of clusters. It leverages widely used technologies such as XML for data representation, XDR for compact, portable data transport, and RRDtool for data storage and visualization. It uses engineered data structures and algorithms to achieve low per-node overheads and high concurrency. The implementation is robust, has been ported to an extensive set of operating systems and processor architectures, and is currently in use on thousands of clusters around the world. It has been used to link clusters across university campuses and around the world and can scale to handle clusters with 2000 nodes.

For additional information, see http://ganglia.info.

Iperf was developed by NLANR/DAST to measure maximum TCP and UDP bandwidth performance. Iperf allows the tuning of various parameters and UDP characteristics. Iperf reports bandwidth, delay jitter, datagram loss.

For additional information, see http://sourceforge.net/projects/iperf/ or http://iperf.sourceforge.net.

The link layer discover protocol (LLDP) is an industry standard protocol that is designed to supplant proprietary link layer protocols such as EDP or CDP. The goal of LLDP is to provide an intervendor compatible mechanism to deliver link layer notifications to adjacent network devices.

For more information, see https://vincentbernat.github.io/lldpd/index.html.

For more information, see https://www.nagios.org/.

OpenSSH is an open-source version of the SSH connectivity tools that encrypts all traffic (including passwords) to eliminate eavesdropping, connection hijacking, and other attacks. OpenSSH provides secure tunneling capabilities and several authentication methods, and supports all SSH protocol versions.

For more information, see http://www.openssh.com.

Quagga is a network routing software suite that implements various routing protocols. Quagga daemons are configured through a network accessible CLI called a "vty."

Note	Only Quagga BGP has been validated.

For more information, see http://www.nongnu.org/quagga/.

Splunk is a web-based data collection, analysis, and monitoring tool that has search, visualization, and prepackaged content for use-cases. The raw data is sent to the Splunk server using the Splunk Universal Forwarder. Universal Forwarders provide reliable, secure data collection from remote sources and forward that data into the Splunk Enterprise for indexing and consolidation. They can scale to tens of thousands of remote systems, collecting terabytes of data with a minimal impact on performance.

For additional information, see http://www.splunk.com/en_us/download/universal-forwarder.html.

tcollector is a client-side process that gathers data from local collectors and pushes the data to Open Time Series Database (OpenTSDB).

tcollector has the following features:

• Runs data collectors and collates the data.

• Manages connections to the time series database (TSD).

• Eliminates the need to embed TSD code in collectors.

• Deduplicates repeated values.

• Handles wire protocol work.

For additional information, see http://opentsdb.net/docs/build/html/user_guide/utilities/tcollector.html.

tcpdump is a CLI application that prints a description of the contents of packets on a network interface that match a Boolean expression. The description is preceded by a timestamp, printed, by default, as hours, minutes, seconds, and fractions of a second since midnight.

For more information, see http://www.tcpdump.org/manpages/tcpdump.1.html.

TShark is a network protocol analyzer on the CLI. Tshar lets you capture packet data from a live network, or read packets from a previously saved capture file. You can print either a decoded form of those packets to the standard output or write the packets to a file. TShark's native capture file format is pcap, the format that is used by tcpdump and various other tools also. TShark can be used within the Guest Shell after removing the cap_net_admin file capability.

setcap
 cap_net_raw=ep /sbin/dumpcap

Note	This command must be run within the Guest Shell.

For more information, see https://www.wireshark.org/docs/man-pages/tshark.html.