Scalable network monitors for high-speed links: a bottom-up approach

Abstract

Monitoring traffic on high-speed links using commodity hardware is difficult due to relatively slow buses and memories. It is possible to alleviate the burden on these resources by pushing down packet processing to programmable NICs. Until now, however, the use of such cards for monitoring by network administrators has not been a practical solution, because programming the cards is too complex. For this purpose, we introduce NIC-FIX, a monitoring framework for network processors that scales to high link rates and is easy to use.