P4NetIntel: End-to-End Network Telemetry with eBPF and XDP
Cleiton Puttlitz, Ricardo Parizotto, Alberto Egon Schaeffer-Filho · 2024
Observability is essential for providing insights about the network state. These insights are helpful for multiple tasks, such as providing better load balancing, congestion control, and troubleshooting. However, existing observability solutions are often confined to two distinct silos: either within the network infrastructure or on the end-hosts. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we present P4NetIntel, a system to track the entire life-cycle of a flow using end-to-end telemetry. The system extends INT techniques with host telemetry using eBPF, which can monitor application requests without changing the application code. P4NetIntel switches employ techniques to reduce the telemetry overhead, such as discretizing monitoring values and sampling. In addition, eBPF-XDP and TC hooks are used on hosts to intercept and monitor incoming packets transparently to applications. We implemented a prototype of P4NetIntel on the behavior model for P4 programs and in a hardware testbed with Nvidia-Mellanox’s Bluefield-2 SmartNICs. Our results show that our solution can perform end-to-end monitoring with negligible impact on the request/response time.