Enabling Fine-Grained Packet Loss Monitoring in Cloud Networks

Excessive network packet loss is one of the strongest symptoms of the presence of some hardware or software-related infrastructure anomaly. As such, multiple techniques to rapidly and efficiently measure packet loss in physical network equipment have been developed throughout the years. Yet, most of the proposed techniques fall short in the case of cloud scenarios which combine the presence of physical and virtual network devices. In this paper, we tackle the problem of providing lightweight and fine-grained packet loss monitoring at virtual switches. We achieve our goal by combining packet coloring, with efficient packet loss signal extraction and aggregation entirely within the virtual switch level. To understand its feasibility in a production environment, the proposed system has been implemented and evaluated in a synthetic scenario and for real-world use cases. Our implementation on top of OvS-DPDK shows that the proposed system achieves 95% accurate packet loss measurement while introducing negligible switching throughput degradation.