What You Should Know About Telemetry in Networking?

In the ever-evolving world of networking, telemetry has emerged as a pivotal tool for optimizing performance and ensuring reliability. At its core, telemetry in networking refers to the real-time collection, transmission, and analysis of data from network devices and systems. This process provides network administrators with invaluable insights into network behavior, performance metrics, and potential issues. By harnessing telemetry, organizations can achieve a granular understanding of their network operations, enabling them to proactively address problems, streamline maintenance, and enhance overall efficiency.

What Is Telemetry Technology?

Telemetry is a cutting-edge technology designed for high-speed remote data collection from both physical and virtual devices. These devices periodically push critical metrics such as interface traffic statistics, CPU usage, and memory usage to dedicated collectors. This push mode of data transmission offers significant advantages over the traditional pull mode, which relies on question-answer interactions. By continuously sending data, the push mode ensures faster, more real-time data collection and analysis, enabling quicker responses and more efficient management of resources. This method not only enhances the accuracy of monitoring but also reduces latency, making it ideal for dynamic and high-demand environments.

Why Choose Telemetry for Network Monitoring?

As software-defined networking (SDN) scales up, the demand for carrying more services grows, and users require more advanced intelligent SDN operations and maintenance (O&M). This necessitates monitoring data with higher precision sampling intervals to efficiently detect and adjust microburst traffic. Additionally, the monitoring process must minimally impact device functions and performance to enhance device and network utilization.

Conventional network monitoring methods, such as Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) Get and command line interface (CLI), are inefficient and fail to meet user requirements due to several drawbacks:

• Pull Mode: This method retrieves monitoring data from devices, but it cannot handle a large number of network nodes, restricting network expansion.

• Sampling Interval: Typically accurate to the minute. Increasing accuracy requires more frequent data queries, which raises CPU usage on network nodes and disrupts normal device functions.

• Inaccuracy: Data from monitored network nodes is often delayed due to network transmission lags.

To address these issues, telemetry technology has been developed for large-scale, high-performance monitoring of network devices. This technology enables intelligent O&M systems to manage more devices, obtain real-time monitoring data with higher precision, and minimize the impact on device functions and performance. Telemetry also lays a critical foundation for big data analytics, supporting fast fault location and network quality optimization. It transforms network quality analysis into a big data problem, effectively bolstering intelligent O&M.

How Does Telemetry Work?

Telemetry System Architecture

Telemetry is a closed-loop automatic O&M system comprising two main components: the device side (network devices) and the OSS side, which includes the collector, analyzer, and controller. 

Figur1. Telemetry System Architecture

Telemetry Service Process

Telemetry's OSS and device sides collaborate to complete the telemetry service process.

Configuring a subscription: A subscription can be configured on network devices to subscribe to data sources for data collection.

The device supports the following subscription modes: Static subscription: You can run commands to configure subscription data sources to collect data from telemetry-capable devices. Static subscription is often used for coarse-grained data collection. Dynamic subscription: You can run commands to configure the Google Remote Procedure Call (gRPC) service. The collector delivers dynamic configurations through gRPC to telemetry-capable devices in order to collect data.

Pushing Sampled Data: Devices report sampled data to the collector according to the configurations set by the controller. The collector then receives and stores this data.

Reading Data: The analyzer retrieves the data stored in the collector.

Analyzing Data: The analyzer processes the data and forwards the results to the controller for network management and optimization.

Adjusting Network Parameters: The controller sends updated network configurations to the devices that require adjustments. After the configurations are applied, devices report new sampled data to the collector. The OSS evaluates whether the network optimization meets the desired goals. The service process concludes once the optimization is confirmed successful.

Figure 2. Telemetry Service Process

FS AmpCon™-T Management Platform

AmpCon™-T is an integrated operations and maintenance (O&M) management platform for optical networking. It supports the latest FS DCI equipment, the D7000 series, delivering optimal management for your DCI infrastructure. AmpCon™-T supports network telemetry by offering fine-grained monitoring with high-precision and diverse data collection, which effectively reflects network conditions. It enables rapid fault localization in complex networks, achieving millisecond-level fault detection and significantly reducing fault handling time. With AmpCon™-T, active reporting is streamlined through a one-time configuration for continuous data reporting from devices, thereby minimizing business interruption risks and enhancing network reliability and stability.

Figure 3. FS AmpCon™-T Platform

Conclusion

In summary, telemetry technology represents a significant advancement in network monitoring, offering high-speed, precise data collection that surpasses traditional methods. With its ability to handle large-scale, real-time monitoring and rapid fault localization, telemetry enhances network efficiency and reliability. AmpCon™-T leverages these capabilities to provide a comprehensive O&M solution, optimizing network performance and stability while minimizing disruptions. As SDN environments grow, adopting telemetry with solutions like AmpCon™-T becomes crucial for effective network management.