What You Should Know About Telemetry in Networking?

LarryAug 05, 20241 min read

Struggling to identify network issues before they disrupt operations? Telemetry is the solution. It enables real-time data collection and analysis from network devices, providing continuous insights into performance and potential problems. This helps organizations proactively address issues, streamline maintenance, and boost network efficiency and reliability.

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) expands, the need for handling more services and advanced intelligent SDN operations and maintenance (O&M) increases. This drives the need for more precise monitoring with higher sampling intervals to detect and manage microburst traffic efficiently. Additionally, the monitoring process must minimize the impact on device performance to optimize overall network utilization.

Traditional network monitoring methods, like Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) Get and command line interface (CLI), face several limitations:

Pull Mode

: Data retrieval is inefficient for large-scale networks, limiting expansion potential.

Sampling Interval

: Conventional methods typically provide minute-based accuracy. Increasing accuracy leads to higher CPU usage, which affects device performance.

Inaccuracy

: Network transmission delays often result in outdated or inaccurate data.

Telemetry technology addresses these challenges by enabling large-scale, high-performance monitoring. It allows intelligent O&M systems to manage more devices and collect real-time, high-precision data with minimal impact on performance. Furthermore, telemetry supports big data analytics for rapid fault detection and network optimization, transforming network quality management into an actionable data-driven process, thereby enhancing intelligent O&M.

Item	Telemetry	SNMP Get	SNMP Trap	CLI	Syslog
Working mode	Push	Pull	Push	Pull	Push
Precision	Subseconds	Minutes	Seconds	Minutes	Seconds
Structured	Structured using the YANG model	Structured using MIBs	Structured using MIBs	Non-structured	Non-structured

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

The telemetry service process is a collaborative effort between the OSS and device sides, ensuring efficient data collection and network optimization.

Subscription Configuration:

Static Subscription:

Commands are run to configure devices to collect data from predefined sources. This method is typically used for coarse-grained data collection.

Dynamic Subscription:

Using gRPC, dynamic configurations are delivered to telemetry-capable devices for real-time data collection. This allows for more flexible and precise data monitoring.

Data Push: Devices push sampled data to the collector based on pre-configured settings. The collector receives and stores this data for further processing.

Data Retrieval: The analyzer retrieves the stored data from the collector, making it available for analysis.

Data Analysis: The analyzer processes the data and sends the results to the controller, where it is used for network management and optimization.

Network Adjustment: The controller applies updated network configurations to the devices, ensuring that the network operates as expected. After these changes, devices send new sampled data to the collector for continuous monitoring. The OSS evaluates the success of these optimizations, concluding the process when the desired network performance is achieved.

Figure 2. Telemetry Service Process

FS AmpCon™-T Management Platform

AmpCon-T is an integrated operations and maintenance (O&M) management platform for OTN/WDM devices in optical networking. It supports FS DCI equipment, the D7000 series and DCP 920 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.