Programmable Measurement Architecture

Measurement is at least half of network management. Many data centers require huge capital investments to build larger networks with higher link speeds; yet provide surprisingly little visibility into the network and traffic. Switch vendors often treat measurement as a second-class citizen, devoting most resources to control functions. Operators have limited control over what (not) to measure, and thus have to integrate incomplete measurement data from individual devices. Inspired by software-defined networking, we propose to design and build a new programmable measurement architecture that bridges the gap between operator's measurement requirements and device capabilities. We allow operators to flexibly program queries about the network state they need, provide generic and efficient primitives at many devices (hosts, switches, and reconfigurable devices), and automatically match the queries with the primitives. Our solutions have gained significant interests from both production data center operators and programmable switch vendors.