Patcher: Towards Fault - Tolerant Probing Planning for In-band Network Telemetry

Abstract

In-band Network Telemetry (INT) is a recent network monitoring approach. Despite the existence of a few initiatives to orchestrate the collection of in-band network statistics, little has yet been done to coordinate active INT probes to collect network information efficiently while considering the possibility of device failures (e.g., power failure, hardware failure). In this paper, we introduce Patcher - fault-tolerant probing planning for INT. It reconstructs probing cycles affected by failure nodes and optimizes them while ensuring all non-affected links/statistics are still being traversed/collected. Results show that Patcher reduces the number of probe cycles needed up to 5.5x compared to a state-of-the-art solution, while not increasing the INT collectors' load.