UMON: flexible and fine grained traffic monitoring in open vSwitch

Abstract

We study how to provide fine-grained, flexible traffic monitoring in the Open vSwitch (OVS). We argue that the existing OVS monitoring tools are neither flexible nor sufficient for supporting many monitoring applications. We propose UMON, a mechanism that decouples monitoring from forwarding, and offers flexible and fine-grained traffic stats. We describe a prototype implementation of UMON that integrates well with the OVS architecture. Finally, we evaluate the performance using the prototype, and illustrate UMON's efficiency with the example use cases such as detecting port scans.