Fabric view¶
The Fabric view shows what an SR Linux lab looks like, what is wrong with it, and what changed. It reads the nodes over gNMI, read-only, with fcling.
Right-click a running lab in the explorer and pick Tools > Open Fabric View. It works in VS Code, the desktop app, and the web app. The entry shows on labs with at least one SR Linux node.
What you can see¶
| View | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Topology | The fabric by tier, with each node's health and each cable's state. Click one for its details. |
| Nodes | Whether each node is streaming, and since when. |
| Incidents | What is wrong, grouped by root cause, worst first, and what changed just before. Acknowledge the ones you know about. |
| History | Every change kept, with the configuration commit that likely caused it, and that commit's diff. |
| Lenses | Where finds an IP or MAC, Path traces a route hop by hop, Service compares a service across nodes, and Endpoints lists the attached hosts. |
| Reports | Any report as a table you can sort and filter, such as bgp-peers, ipv4-rib or lldp. |
Type a time in Go back, such as 30m, 2h or 14:02, to see the fabric as it was then.
What runs where¶
The view starts one container for the lab on the lab host, on the lab's management network. The first time, its image is pulled, which can take a minute. Each app release uses one fcling version, ghcr.io/srl-labs/fcling:0.9.0 in this one, so an fcling release changes nothing until the app moves to it.
- It keeps running when you close the view, so the history goes on. Stop engine in the view's menu stops it and keeps the history for the next start.
- Destroying the lab from the app removes the container and its history. Redeploying removes the container and keeps the history; start it again from the view.
- A plain
containerlab destroyon the command line does not know about the container. It is removed the next time an engine starts on that host; on a lab host runningclab-api-server, within five minutes.
Each node gives the container about 2 of its 20 gNMI sessions.
Limits¶
- Only SR Linux nodes are read. They need gNMI on, and SR Linux's default credentials.
- It is not available on Kubernetes (c9s) lab hosts.
- A lab host running
clab-api-serverneeds a version that listsfclingin its features. On an older one, update the server to use the view.
Reports without the view¶
The explorer's Run fcling entries run one report in a throwaway container and show its output. They do not start anything that stays running.