Last month, we announced VRF Awareness Phase 1, including new dimensions associated with VRFs (virtual routing and forwarding). We’ve now added support for VRF attributes in the Interface methods of our Device API, which you can experiment with in our API tester (EU customers will find the tester here). The new parameters for these methods give you programmatic control of VRF attributes associated with each interface.

If SNMP polling is enabled in your Kentik instance, the VRF attributes of each interface would normally be discovered automatically as Kentik polls the VRF MIB (refer to our KB topic on Kentik-polled SNMP OIDs to see the OIDs we poll). But with VRF support in our Interface methods you can now programmatically define or redefine mappings (including RT/RD related data) between physical interfaces and the VRFs to which they belong. This could be particularly useful in the following situations:

• If your Kentik instance doesn’t use SNMP polling.
• If you have SNMP polling enabled on your device, but either:
  • Your device doesn’t support the VRF MIB.
  • The device SNMP policy doesn’t allow polling the VRF OIDs.
• If you want your VRFs to appear in Kentik Detect with names that are more human-readable than the names retrieved from SNMP.

The new parameters in the Interface methods of the Device API support both of the following cases:

• Interface creation: VRF parameters have been added to the Interface Create method.

• Interface updating: VRF parameters have also been added to the Interface Update method.

For additional information, please contact our Customer Success team.