Stroboscope: Declarative Network Monitoring on a Budget

Authors: Olivier Tilmans, Tobias Bühler, Ingmar Poese, Stefano Vissicchio, and Laurent Vanbever
Proceedings of the 15th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
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Abstract

For an Internet Service Provider (ISP), getting an accurate picture of how its network behaves is challenging. Indeed, given the carried traffic volume and the impossibility to control end-hosts, ISPs often have no other choice but to rely on heavily sampled traffic statistics, which provide them with coarse-grained visibility at a less than ideal time resolution (seconds or minutes).

We present Stroboscope, a system that enables fine-grained monitoring of any traffic flow by instructing routers to mirror millisecond-long traffic slices in a programmatic way. Stroboscope takes as input high-level monitoring queries together with a budget and automatically determines: (i) which flows to mirror; (ii) where to place mirroring rules, using fast and provably correct algorithms; and (iii) when to schedule these rules to maximize coverage while meeting the input budget.

We implemented Stroboscope, and show that it scales well: it computes schedules for large networks and query sizes in few seconds, and produces a number of mirroring rules well within the limits of current routers. We also show that Stroboscope works on existing routers and is therefore immediately deployable.

Research Area: Network Analysis and Reasoning

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Dr. Tobias Bühler
PhD student
2016—2023

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BibTex

@INPROCEEDINGS{tilmans2018stroboscope,
	isbn = {978-1-931971-43-0},
	copyright = {In Copyright - Non-Commercial Use Permitted},
	year = {2018},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of the 15th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation},
	type = {Conference Paper},
	institution = {SBFI},
	author = {Tilmans, Olivier and Bühler, Tobias and Poese, Ingmar and Vissicchio, Stefano and Vanbever, Laurent},
	language = {en},
	address = {Berkeley, CA},
	publisher = {USENIX Association},
	DOI = {10.3929/ethz-b-000259851},
	title = {Stroboscope: Declarative Network Monitoring on a Budget},
	PAGES = {467 - 482},
	Note = {15th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2018); Conference Location: Renton, WA, USA; Conference Date: April 9-11, 2018}
}

Research Collection: 20.500.11850/350009

Slide Sources: https://gitlab.ethz.ch/projects/41216