AmLight Real Time In-Band Telemetry Within the NoviFlow Switches

Network troubleshooting and monitoring are essential in the network management routine. A novel approach, real-time In-band Network Telemetry (INT), allows monitoring the data plane at line-rate. Its mechanism works by attaching real-time network telemetry to every packet, supporting fine-grained monitoring. Deploying INT is possible via two variants: programming the switches using the P4 programming language or installing new hardware that supports that feature. This methodology brings advantages to Software-Defined Networking (SDN) networks in terms of monitoring granularity. The AmLight-INT approach is addressing troubleshooting activities on SDN networks. The goal behind INT’s implementation and applications around this approach is to enforce network issues mitigation capacity and capability throughout the new Intel (a.k.a. Barefoot Tofino) chipset. The AmLight-INT approach has required the implementation of new software to handle the collection process to acquire all the INT telemetry reports. The AmLight-INT solution includes few newly developed applications such as the INT Collector, QueueTop, ProofOfTransit, and TCP Health Checker. The research was done thanks to industry and academic collaboration. The information provided by the AmLight-INT project brings helpful insights to understand some details related to the network’s use and state.