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Splice

Point at a NETCONF device's IP, get a working gNMI server.

Vendor-agnostic telemetry for optical and network gear that never spoke gRPC.

Modern telemetry collectors — gnmic, Telegraf, OpenConfig pipelines — expect gNMI over gRPC. But a huge amount of deployed optical and transport gear only speaks NETCONF: ROADMs, transponders, amplifiers, line systems. Each vendor ships its own YANG models, its own list keys, its own quirks.

Splice fixes that. Give it an IP and credentials; it discovers the device's YANG models, builds a telemetry catalog, polls NETCONF under the hood, and serves standard gNMI to any client — no per-vendor code, no changes to the device.

Multi-vendor optical power in Grafana

Three different vendors — Lumentum ROADM, Adtran Teraflex, Juniper ILA — streaming optical power into one Grafana dashboard through Splice.

No hardware? No problem.

Everything below works against a built-in simulated device. Run splice --simulate openroadm run and point any gNMI client at localhost:9339. See Simulation.

How It Works

graph LR
    D["NETCONF device<br/>:830 (SSH)"] -->|YANG discovery| C[Catalog]
    C --> P[Poller]
    P -->|NETCONF get| D
    P --> M[(TTL cache)]
    M --> G["gNMI server<br/>:9339 (gRPC)"]
    G -->|gNMI Get / Subscribe| K["gnmic · Telegraf<br/>AI agents"]
    DB[(PostgreSQL)] -.-> C

Discovery walks the device's YANG library into module-qualified catalog paths, the planner batches them into efficient NETCONF reads, and a resilient poller fills a TTL cache that the gRPC server answers from. Performance-monitoring data is published under synthetic, instance-keyed paths so per-port metrics never collide.

For the full picture — the three usage stacks, the layered design, and the data flow — see the Architecture overview.

Key Features

Feature Description
🧭 Zero-touch onboarding quickstart --host <ip> discovers YANG, builds the catalog, and serves gNMI in one command
🏷️ Vendor-agnostic Works across any NETCONF/YANG device — proven live on Lumentum, Adtran, and Juniper gear
🔑 Instance-keyed telemetry PM data carries its originating port as gNMI keys, so multi-line metrics stay distinct
🔁 Drift self-healing Re-resolves list instances at startup and rebuilds filters when a device is re-provisioned
🩺 Lockout-safe resilience Reconnect-once, circuit breaker, and auth/session-limit detection protect fragile devices
🎯 Curated polling Poll only the metrics you care about with include patterns and per-pattern intervals
📊 Grafana dashboards out of the box Setup generates per-device live-telemetry and YANG-inventory dashboards from the catalog
🔎 Hybrid path search Find paths in huge YANG catalogs by keyword (BM25) blended with semantic embeddings
🧪 Hardware-free simulation --simulate openroadm runs the full pipeline against a simulated device
🤖 AI-agent ready Built-in MCP server exposes the bridge as tools for Claude and other agents

Resilience is the load-bearing design choice

Optical devices frequently limit concurrent NETCONF sessions and lock accounts on repeated auth failures, so every RPC path is built to back off rather than hammer. See Observability & Resilience.

Four Ways to Use It

Interface Entry point Best for
CLI + PostgreSQL splice --config <cfg> setup \| run Production: persistent catalog, multi-device, history
Python API Device("sim://openroadm") Scripting and notebooks — no database or config files
MCP server splice mcp AI agents — connect, query, and set config as tools
Interactive TUI splice-tui --devices-dir devices Operators — browse paths, watch live telemetry, run setup

Interactive TUI status dashboard

The Textual console managing a live Adtran Teraflex — health cards, circuit-breaker state, and catalog counts at a glance.

Get Started

The fastest path is two steps: Installation then Quickstart.

Try it right now, no hardware required:

python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .
splice --simulate openroadm run

In another terminal, it answers gNMI like any real server:

gnmic -a localhost:9339 --insecure capabilities
# gNMI version: 0.8.0
# supported models:
#   - org-openroadm-device, 2023-05-26  ...

Then point it at a real device:

NETCONF_PASSWORD='...' splice quickstart --host 10.0.0.1 --username admin

This generates a per-device config, runs full discovery, writes Grafana dashboards for the device, and starts the gNMI server. That's the whole promise — an IP in, a gNMI endpoint out.

Read live values from Python — no DB, no config files

from splice.api.device import Device

with Device("sim://openroadm") as dev:
    print(dev.get("/org-openroadm-device/node-id"))
    # [{'path': '/org-openroadm-device/node-id', 'value': 'ROADM-SIM-01'}]

Dig Deeper

Explore the feature you need:

And the guides for each interface:

Licensing

Splice is dual-licensed:

  1. GNU AGPL v3.0-or-later (see LICENSE) — free for open-source and AGPL-compliant use. If you modify Splice or run it as a network service, the AGPL requires you to make your corresponding source available to its users.
  2. Commercial licence — for proprietary, embedded, or closed-source use without the AGPL's copyleft obligations. See COMMERCIAL-LICENSE.md for a summary.

If you use Splice in a closed-source or commercial product, you must obtain a commercial licence. To request one, contact Trinity College Dublin (Trinity Innovation & Enterprise) at infoknex@tcd.ie.

Copyright (c) 2026 Trinity College Dublin. For the architecture overview aimed at contributors and agents, see CLAUDE.md.

Built for the Open Ireland optical testbed — so any NETCONF device can join a modern telemetry pipeline.