SmartX Multi-View Visibility Framework for Unified Monitoring of SDN-enabled Multisite Cloud Playground

Abstract

Modern information communication technologies (ICT) infrastructures are getting complicated to cope with the various demands needed to accommodate the emerging technology paradigms such as cloud, software-defined networking (SDN), and internet of things (IoT). These ICT infrastructure transformations are causing new sets of operational problems for operators, as a consequence of inadequate end-to-end visibility and visualization support about underlay infrastructure. Particularly for multi-tenant and multisite underlay infrastructure, visibility is essential for the effective operation to easily pinpoint server faults, network bottlenecks, and application performance troubles. Even though many conventional monitoring solutions are now available, multi-layer visibility with interactive visualization support is still limited when operating such complicated infrastructures. To address these limitations, first we propose a futuristic multi-layer visibility framework denoted as SmartX Multi-View Visibility Framework (MVF) for unifying the visibility of underlay, physical and virtual resources, flow, and workload layers. Next, we propose an interactive visualization of multi-layer (i.e., resource and flow layers) visibility to address the real-world operational issues of experimental SDN-enabled multisite clouds, denoted as OF@TEIN Playground. By leveraging SmartX MVF, we strive to enable visibility collection and validation and link it with subsequent visibility integration capability empowered by DataLake-based visibility storage for interactive visualization of playground visibility. After that, to unify multi-layer visibility, we propose a comprehensive extension of SmartX MVF with flow-centric visibility for simultaneously monitoring physical-virtual resources and flows classification to eventually assist secured operation of OF@TEIN Playground. Flow-centric visibility mainly focus on the key details about network packets precise collection from distributed SmartX boxes and visibility integration. Additionally, by taking the example of OF@TEIN Playground, we present verification results on software prototype implementations. These results justify the proposed approaches for timely unveiling critical operational issues by efficaciously leveraging the multi-layer visibility.