Programmable Diagnostic Network Measurement with Localization and Traffic Observation

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01433-3__9As networks become increasingly complex and pervasive, understanding and evaluating their running behavior and diagnosing configuration problems becomes more challenging and yet more important. This motivates a need to craft new diagnostic measurements suited to particular network environments and applications. However, once measurement protocols are in place on network devices it becomes difficult to modify them to new needs. Others have explored programmatic approaches that allow executing custom code at otherwise “unintelligent” network devices in order to provide configuration management and define new services. This approach can also be used to make meta-level observations from within a running network. We introduce a programmatic approach to diagnostic network measurement that offers such observation. It gives users a language in which to express measurements succinctly and an execution platform that enables network observation and localization of measurement. The design of the language and its platform are sketched with an example application