Sonata: Query-driven streaming network telemetry

Abstract

Managing and securing networks requires collecting and analyzing network traffic data in real time. Existing telemetry systems do not allow operators to express the range of queries needed to perform management or scale to large traffic volumes and rates. We present Sonata, an expressive and scalable telemetry system that coordinates joint collection and analysis of network traffic. Sonata provides a declarative interface to express queries for a wide range of common telemetry tasks; to enable real-time execution, Sonata partitions each query across the stream processor and the data plane, running as much of the query as it can on the network switch, at line rate. To optimize the use of limited switch memory, Sonata dynamically refines each query to ensure that available resources focus only on traffic that satisfies the query. Our evaluation shows that Sonata can support a wide range of telemetry tasks while reducing the workload for the stream processor by as much as seven orders of magnitude compared to existing telemetry systems.