ATINT: Planning for Anomaly-Tolerant Probing for Network-Wide In-Band Network Telemetry

In-band Network Telemetry (INT) plays a vital role in modern computer networks since it can frequently collect device-internal states hop-by-hop to enable high-resolution network monitoring. To perform network-wide monitoring, high-level orchestration is required to establish multiple monitoring paths across the entire network. Existing research minimizes telemetry overhead by maintaining minimal path overlap, allowing the system to capture the network state with low overhead while assuming that there is no network anomalies. However, in production deployments, the measurement system is not always executed in an environment without network anomalies. When INT probes are dropped or delayed caused by anomalies, this can result in measurement failures at additional locations than just the anomaly sites, leading to (i.) incorrect decisions by network applications, (ii.) hindering the analysis, and (iii.) localization of anomalies. To overcome these issues, we introduce ATINT, a novel path planning algorithm that guarantees uninterrupted measurements in the locations without anomalies when the number of network anomaly locations is below a predefined threshold. We defined the problem as an Integer Linear Programming model and proposed a heuristic algorithm to find possible optimal solutions. ATINT orchestrates redundant measurements in a staggered manner, continuously providing visibility of the network state when anomalies take place at a low measurement cost. Our evaluation within a network composed of 245 switches shows that our solution reduces the interruption probability to 19.4% and decreases the additional unmonitored links to 0.07% with respect to state-of-the-art INT probe solution.