Towards Monitoring Programmability in Future Internet: Challenges and Solutions

Abstract

Internet is becoming a global IT infrastructure serving interactive and real-time services ubiquitously accessible by heterogeneous network-enabled devices. In the Internet of Services (IoS) era, monitoring infrastructures must provide to network operators fine-grained service-specific information which can be derived by dissecting application level protocols. To accommodate these new monitoring requirements network probes must be flexible, easy to extend and still be capable of analyzing high-speed network streams. Despite the increased complexity, software and hardware technologies on top of which network probes are implemented have been designed when monitoring requirements were substantially different and almost left unchanged. As a result, implementing modern probes is challenging and time consuming. In this paper we identify desirable features for reducing the work required to develop complex probes, and we present a home-grown comprehensive software framework that significantly simplifies the creation of service-oriented monitoring applications.

StreaMon: a data-plane programming abstraction for Software-defined Stream Monitoring

“…The sheer volume of networked information, in conjunction with the complexity and polymorphous nature of modern cyberthreats, calls for scalable, accurate, and, at the same time, flexible and programmable monitoring systems [13,11]. The challenge is to promptly react to fastly mutating needs by deploying custom traffic analyses, capable of tracking event chains and multistage attacks, and efficiently handle the many heterogeneous features, events, and conditions which characterize an operational failure, a network application mis-behavior, an anomaly or an incoming attack.…”