Trident: Efficient and practical software network monitoring

Network monitoring is receiving more attention than ever with the need for a self-driving network to tackle increasingly severe network management challenges. Advanced management applications rely on traffic data analyses, which require network monitoring to flexibly provide comprehensive traffic characteristics. Moreover, in virtualized environments, software network monitoring is constrained by available resources and requirements of cloud operators. In this paper, Trident, a policy-based network monitoring system at the host, is proposed. Trident is a novel monitoring approach, off-path configurable streaming, which offers remote analyzers a fine-grained holistic view of the network traffic. A novel fast path packet classification algorithm and a corresponding cached flow form are also proposed to improve monitoring efficiency. Evaluated in a practical deployment, Trident demonstrates negligible interference with forwarding and requires no additional software dependencies. Trident has been deployed in production networks of several Tier-IV datacenters.