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Lab 3: EQL - the EDA Query Language#

A key philosophy of EDA is to make state streamable for further processing, where state can be sourced externally via gRPC, internally via core services, or locally via Kubernetes. Beyond being used as event triggers, state is incredibly useful for debugging, and so we required a means to allow humans to interact with it also. Enter the EDA Query Language, or EQL.

Loosely based on Jira Query Language, EQL allows the full surface area of the EDA API, all state info in EDB, along with the full surface area of managed endpoints to be queried and parsed in real time. Queries can be made real time in the heat of troubleshooting, with instantaneous, streaming results. Queries can be sourced as data for visualizations, and streamed via the API allowing external applications to constrain event triggers.

Step 1: EDA Query Language...naturally#

EQL is very powerful...but...it also has a learning curve so we figured we'd try to make it easy for you to consume using natural language!

Have a go by navigating to the queries page in the UI, selecting Natural Language in the drop down.

eql

Here are some queries we thought were interesting to get you started!

  • List me up interfaces
  • List me all interfaces that have an MTU of 9232, sorted by interface name
  • What statistics are available on interfaces
  • List me all nodes are running software version less than 24.8
  • List me all nodes are running software version less than 24.3
  • What is the serial number of linecard 1 in spine-1-1?
  • Show me the unique reasons interfaces are down
  • show me the unique reasons interfaces are down, count the unique values
  • Show me all my processes sorted by memory usage descending
  • Show me the total numbers of packets sent on all interfaces
  • Show me the number of mac addresses on subinterfaces on "leaf-1-1", include the interface name
  • Google translate show me up interfaces on "leaf-1-1" - french and japanese