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

Abstract

Summary 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.