OvS-DPDK Keep Alive + Monitoring Frameworks (Collected, Snap) by Maryam Tahhan

OvS-DPDK Keep Alive + Monitoring Frameworks (Collected, Snap)- Maryam Tahhan and Bhanuprakash Bodireddy, Intel

Providing carrier grade Service Assurance is critical and an essential ingredient in the network transformation to a software defined and virtualized network (NFV). Medium-/large-scale cloud environments account for between hundreds and hundreds of thousands of infrastructure systems. It is vital to proactively and predicatively protect service availability and performance by monitoring the systems for malfunctions that could lead to users’ application service disruption.

OvS-DPDK provides a compelling solution to Cloud service providers deploying NFV in their infrastructure. Monitoring the health and performance of virtual switch is essential in service assurance solution and can be handled by keep-Alive mechanism. DPDK Keep Alive (KA) is a feature that acts as a heartbeat/watchdog for DPDK packet processing cores, to detect application thread failure. The purpose is to ensure the failure of the core does not result in a fault that is not detectable by a management entity. The KA feature in DPDK supports the exposure of the core state of DPDK processing cores to external monitoring applications such as collectd/ Snap. Collectd is a system statistics daemon and Snap is an open telemetry framework. Both expose platform metrics and events to higher level fault management applications that promptly react to these faults in order to facilitate more resilient and performant telco/NFV clouds.

This talk will provide an overview of the Keep Alive feature for OVS as well as an overview of how that feature is exposed through collectd and Snap to fault management applications.

About Bhanuprakash Bodireddy
Bhanuprakash is a software engineer at Intel Corporation focusing on virtual switching solutions. Before joining Intel he has been involved in building Telecom solutions for Asian mobile operators and had significant contributions towards fastpath optimization in vEPC. He also worked on building reliable fronthaul solution at a startup that built vRAN solution using Ethernet fronthaul. He is also passionate about FOSS and have actively contributed to FreeBSD mips and OvS.

About Maryam Tahhan
Maryam Tahhan is a Network Software Engineer at Intel Corporation. Her focus has been on virtual switching, virtual switch performance and enabling service assurance features in DPDK. She leads 2 open source projects in OPNFV: VSPERF (vSwitch Performance Characterization) and SFQM (Software Fastpath Service Quality Metrics). Maryam’s current focus is enabling Open APIs for Service Assurance for Intel Platforms