Selective In-band Network Telemetry for Overhead Reduction

In-band network telemetry (INT) in programming protocol-independent packet processor (P4) is an emerging network monitoring framework that allows data packets to query different switch-internal states. Meanwhile, the existing INT monitors all data packets and thus significant network overhead can be caused by per-packet INT header and the monitoring engine can be overloaded. To address these issues, we proposed a selective INT (sINT) where the ratio of packets to be monitored can be adjusted depending on the frequency of significant changes in network information. The preliminary results show that sINT can detect all the significant data plane events while reducing the network overhead and the monitoring engine load.