Automating Network Monitoring on Experimental Testbeds

Despite experimental testbeds ’ rapid growth and continued strong demand by researchers, the power of testbeds can be further increased by providing additional tools to help experimenters instrument their experiments. Experimenters with improved instrumentation support can deepen their understanding of experiment operation, and have an easier task of generating high quality datasets to share with the community. We introduce a prototype tool that automatically deploys an instrumentation overlay on an existing testbed experiment. Netflowize modifies instantiated experiments to collect experiment-wide flow statistics. The resources consumed by the flow collection process are specified by the experimenter. NetFlow records are widely used by the networking and security research communities for tasks ranging from traffic engineering to detecting anomalous behaviors associated with zeroday attacks. We discuss tool design and implementation, present usage examples, and highlight the many challenges of auto-deploying an experiment-wide monitoring infrastructure.