One question that has come up lately from VMware Cloud on AWS customers is to understand their network traffic usage, especially as it pertains to traffic that exit or egress their SDDC. There are a number of graphical tools that can be used today to get insights into this information, one is the popular vRealize Network Insight Cloud solution which many of our VMware Cloud on AWS customers are taking advantage of to not only understand traffic usage and flow data history but is also instrumental in aiding customers when planning workload migrations from their on-premises datacenter to VMware Cloud on AWS.
While researching this topic, I also came to learn that this information can be retrieved using the NSX-T Policy API which is available to all customers to use. We are going to be leveraging the Tier-0 statistics interface API from NSX-T which will give us both transmit and receive stats on all supported interfaces. From the diagram below, we can see the interfaces that are applicable to VMware Cloud on AWS is the Internet interface which includes VPN traffic, VPC interface which includes traffic going to Linked VPC and Direct Connect interface which includes traffic when using AWS Direct Connect.
As you might expect, these exact same three interface types is then represented as logical interfaces within the NSX-T Policy API which uses the following IDs:
- cross-vpc
- public
- direct-connect
Note: Statistics on the Direct Connect interface will also include traffic if you are using the new VMware Transit Connect with AWS Transit Gateway feature.
These interface can be discovered by performing a GET on /policy/api/v1/infra/tier-0s/vmc/locale-services/default/interfaces and then you would then identify the two NSX-T Edge (Active/Passive) and construct the T0 URL to retrieve the statistics. I will not bore you with the details and have implemented this as a new PowerShell function called Get-NSXTT0Stats and for those interested in the implementation, please see the code here.
Note: For those wanting to see the full NSX-T Policy REST URLs, simply append -Troubleshoot flag and that will output additional information on how I am retrieving the various pieces of information required to call into the T0 Stats API.
Below are the instructions for setting up and using the new NSX-T Policy API function.
Step 1 - Install the NSX-T for VMC Community PowerShell Module from PS Gallery:
Install-Module VMware.VMC.NSXT
Step 2 - Connect to VMC API endpoint using Connect-VmcServer cmdlet:
Connect-VmcServer -RefreshToken $RefreshToken
Step 3 - Connect to NSX-T Proxy API endpoint using Connect-NSTProxy function:
Connect-NSXTProxy -RefreshToken $RefreshToken -OrgName $Org -SDDCName $SDDCName
Step 4 - Run the Get-NSXTT0Stats function to retrieve both RX/TX stats for all interface types on the T0
By default, the function will do a "pretty print" of the output for readability. If you prefer to extract specific values, you can specify -NonPrettyPrint option which you can then save the output to a variable for further processing and/or alerting.
Its great having this point-in-time visibility of your traffic usage but I imagine most customers will want to track and trend this over time and probably even generate an alert when certain thresholds may occur. I think this would be an awesome set of metrics to collect and forward to our vRealize Operations Cloud or VMware Wavefront 🙂
Hi , I am getting the below error while retreiving stats
Get-NSXTT0Stats: Error in retrieving NSX-T Edge Cluster
Get-NSXTT0Stats:
({
"module_name" : "common-services",
"error_message" : "The requested URI: /api/v1/infra/sites/default/enforcement-points/vmc-enforcementpoint/edge-clusters could not be found.",
"error_code" : "258"
}
.Exception.Message)