DBStream: An online aggregation, filtering and processing system for network traffic monitoring

Network traffic monitoring systems generate high volumes of heterogeneous data streams which have to be processed and analyzed with different time constraints for daily network management operations. Some monitoring applications such as anomaly detection, performance tracking and alerting require fast processing of specific incoming real-time data. Other applications like fault diagnosis and trend analysis need to process historical data and perform deep analysis on generally heterogeneous sources of data. The Data Stream Warehousing (DSW) paradigm provides the means to handle both types of monitoring applications within a single system, providing fast and rich data analysis capabilities as well as data persistence. In this paper, we introduce DBStream, a novel online traffic monitoring system based on the DSW paradigm, which allows fast and flexible analysis across multiple heterogeneous data sources. DBStream provides a novel stream processing language for implementing data processing modules, as well as aggregation, filtering, and storage capabilities for further data analysis. We show multiple traffic monitoring applications running on DBStream, processing real traffic from operational ISPs.