Overview of Telemetry

Telemetry is a technology developed to fast collect data from physical or virtual devices remotely. Devices use the push mode to proactively send their data information, such as traffic statistics on interfaces, CPU usage, and memory data, to the collector at a specific interval. In the conventional pull mode, devices interact with the collector using questions and answers. The push mode implements real-time and quick data collection.

As the SDN network scale increases, more and more services need to be carried, and users have higher requirements on intelligent SDN O&M. Specifically, monitoring data should have a higher precision, so that microburst traffic can be promptly detected and adjusted. The monitoring process should have little impact on device functions and performance to improve device and network utilization.

A new network monitoring mode is required to implement large-scale and high-performance monitoring on network devices. The telemetry technology is therefore developed to meet the requirement. With this technology, the intelligent O&M system can manage more devices, monitoring data can be obtained in real time with high precision, and the monitoring process has little impact on device functions and performance. This technology provides the most important data basis for fast fault locating and network quality optimization. It converts network quality analysis into big data analysis, effectively supporting intelligent O&M.

Table 1 shows comparison between telemetry and conventional network monitoring modes.

As shown in Table 1, although SNMP trap and Syslog use the push mode, only alarms or events are pushed. Monitoring data such as the interface traffic cannot be collected or sent.