PINT: Probabilistic In-band Network Telemetry Ran Ben Basat Sivaramakrishnan Ramanathan Yuliang Li Harvard University University of Southern California Harvard University
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Gianni Antichi Minlan Yu Michael Mitzenmacher Queen Mary University of London Harvard University Harvard University
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT 42], fast reroute [47], and path tracing [36]. A significant recent Commodity network devices support adding in-band telemetry mea- advance is provided by the In-band Network Telemetry (INT) [75]. surements into data packets, enabling a wide range of applications, INT allows switches to add information to each packet, such as including network troubleshooting, congestion control, and path switch ID, link utilization, or queue status, as it passes by. Such tracing. However, including such information on packets adds sig- telemetry information is then collected at the network egress point nificant overhead that impacts both flow completion times and upon the reception of the packet. application-level performance. INT is readily available in programmable switches and network in- We introduce PINT, an in-band network telemetry framework terface cards (NICs) [8, 14, 58, 85], enabling an unprecedented level that bounds the amount of information added to each packet. PINT of visibility into the data plane behavior and making this technology encodes the requested data on multiple packets, allowing per-packet attractive for real-world deployments [16, 46]. A key drawback of overhead limits that can be as low as one bit. We analyze PINT and INT is the overhead on packets.