Data Formats for In-situ OAM

In-situ Operations, Administration, and Maintenance (OAM) records operational and telemetry information in the packet while the packet traverses a path between two points in the network. This document discusses the data types and data formats for in-situ OAM data records. In-situ OAM data records can be embedded into a variety of transports such as NSH, Segment Routing, VXLAN-GPE, native IPv6 (via extension header), or IPv4. In-situ OAM is to complement current out- of-band OAM mechanisms based on ICMP or other types of probe packets.