Real-time and fine-grained network monitoring using in-band network telemetry

Abstract

In the modern era of software-defined networking (SDN), network monitoring is becoming more important for providing information about a network and helping SDN controllers to make decisions about the network. In-band Network Telemetry (INT) is a new network monitoring framework that collects packet-level network information to provide real-time and fine-grained network monitoring. In this paper, we present the design of the overall INT management architecture and its two main components: the INT management system and INTCollector. The INT management system controls heterogeneous INT-capable devices through a common interface. INTCollector is a high-performance collector for INT data, which uses eXpress Data Path and an event detection mechanism. The evaluation result shows that INTCollector processes telemetry reports 27 times faster than other packet-level telemetry collectors. We made the implementation as open source, to make researchers who are interested in INT implement their own ideas on top of our work.