SRv6-PM: Performance Monitoring of SRv6 Networks with a Cloud-Native Architecture

Segment Routing over IPv6 (SRv6 in short) is a networking solution for IP backbones and datacenters. The SRv6 standardization, implementation and research are actively progressing and SRv6 has already been adopted in a number of large scale network deployments. Effective Performance Monitoring (PM) solutions for SRv6 networks are strongly needed. The design, implementation and deployment of such PM solutions span the different planes of a networking architecture: Performance Measurements data (packet loss and delay) needs to be measured (in the Data Plane), the monitored nodes needs to be controlled (in the Control Plane), the measured data needs to be collected (in the Control/Management Planes), then the Data must be processed and stored, using Big-Data processing solutions. We focus on Loss Monitoring, by considering a solution capable of tracking single packet loss events in near-real time (e.g. with a delay in the order of 20 seconds). We describe SRv6-PM, a solution for Performance Monitoring of SRv6 networks. SRv6-PM features a cloud-native architecture for the SDN-based control of Linux routers and for ingestion, processing, storage and visualization of PM data. In the Data Plane, SRv6-PM includes efficient building blocks for packet loss evaluation (e.g. the packet counting components) in a Linux router. SRv6-PM is released as open source. Not only we provide a reproducible environment for PM experiments, but we also offer a re-usable and extensible cloud-native platform that can be automatically deployed in different environments, from a single host to multiple servers on private/public clouds.