Cloud-Scale Application Performance Monitoring with SDN and NFV

In cloud data centers, more and more services are deployed across multiple tiers to increase flexibility and scalability. However, this makes it difficult for the cloud provider to identify which tier of the application is the bottleneck and how to resolve performance problems. Existing solutions approach this problem by constantly monitoring either in end-hosts or physical switches. Host based monitoring usually needs instrumentation of application code, making it less practical, while network hardware based monitoring is expensive and requires special features in each physical switch. Instead, we believe network wide monitoring should be flexible and easy to deploy in a non-intrusive way by exploiting recent advances in software-based network services. Towards this end we are developing a distributed software-based network monitoring framework for cloud data centers. Our system leverages knowledge of topology and routing information to build relationships between each tier of the application, and detect and locate performance bottlenecks by monitoring the network inside software switches.