[alaties]

I wish it were so simple. Usually, to get data from switches you'll have to poll them via SNMP. Polling via SNMP from a production network usually requires a lot of finagling and working with the network engineering team to expose IP addresses of the switches to be polled.

Brian Brazil (one of the co-authors of Prometheus) wrote an snmp polling tool to use along Prometheus (snmp_exporter). You'll have to find the snmp index file that matches your switch. If one doesn't exist... You're in for a hellscape of snmp probing and determine what is where. On top of that, switch manufacturers regularly do not test snmp values upon firmware releases, so bugs crop up at the counter level regularly between firmware versions. At my last job dealing with this, we when back-to-back with firmware snmp bugs with juniper qfx10ks where counters were regularly off by 1 terabit (easy to work around) to interface data not being exposed via snmp so all reported values were zero...

The bright side is once you have SNMP polling working for networking gear, it's not too hard to extend to power equipment and other data center devices.