DNA: An SDN framework for distributed network analytics

Analytics of network telemetry data helps address many important operational problems. Traditional Big Data approaches run into limitations even as they push scale boundaries for processing data further. One reason for this is the fact that in many cases, the bottleneck for analytics is not analytics processing itself but the generation and export of the data on which analytics depends. The amount of data that can be reasonably collected from the network runs into inherent limitations due to bandwidth and processing constraints in the network itself. In addition, management tasks related to determining and configuring which data to generate lead to significant deployment challenges. In order to address these issues, we propose a novel distributed solution to network analytics. Analytics processing is performed at the source of the data by specialized agents embedded within network devices, which also dynamically set up and reconfigure telemetry data sources as required by an analytics task. An SDN controller application orchestrates network analytics tasks across the network to allow users to interact with the network as a whole instead of individual devices one at a time. The solution has been implemented as a proof-of-concept, called DNA (Distributed Network Analytics).1