Argus: End-to-end service anomaly detection and localization from an ISP's point of view

Abstract

Recent trends in the networked services industry (e.g., CDN, VPN, VoIP, IPTV) see Internet Service Providers (ISPs) leveraging their existing network connectivity to provide an end-to-end solution. Consequently, new opportunities are available to monitor and improve the end-to-end service quality by leveraging the information from inside the network. We propose a new approach to detect and localize end-to-end service quality issues in such ISP-managed networked services by utilizing traffic data passively monitored at the ISP side, the ISP network topology, routing tables and geographic information. This paper presents the design of a generic service quality monitoring system “Argus”. Argus has been successfully deployed in a tier-1 ISP to monitor millions of users of its CDN service and assist operators to detect and localize end-to-end service quality issues. This operational experience demonstrates that Argus is effective in accurate, quick detection and localization of important service quality issues.