A Practical Implementation of In-Band Network Telemetry in Open vSwitch

Abstract

Virtualized network infrastructures of cloud platforms are becoming increasingly complex and hard to manage and monitor for human administrators. Traditional network monitoring approaches like streaming telemetry or active probes are of limited applicability in highly virtualized environments and introduce unwanted overhead. The recent concept of In-Band Network Telemetry (INT) allows detailed observation of physical and virtual networking components exactly when real user traffic traverses them. This approach eliminates the need for artificial probing packets, allows data collection on the level of individual virtual bridge ports, and supports advanced applications like multipath reconstruction, detection of dead hops, and localization of latency bottlenecks. Our prototypical extension of the de-facto standard virtual switch Open vSwitch shows the low resource overhead of INT in an experimental evaluation.