ADT: AI-Driven network Telemetry processing on routers

Abstract

Network monitoring is a pivotal part of network management and operations. It is responsible for monitoring the behavior of the network to assure its functionality within expectation and to guarantee a smooth-running environment for enabling of various services. Therefore, operators are interested in gaining a comprehensive assessment of their network elements and tracking operational changes to facilitate timely correction of any deviation. Commonly, this assessment is achieved by performing regular manual checks of different operational counters and defining expert rules from known root causes. The common approach requires the maintenance of a regularly updated set of rules and only goes as far as the operator’s pre-gained knowledge of the system. With the growing complexity of the networks as well as the availability of more data, a more efficient monitoring approach is necessary to address the emerging network monitoring requirements.In this paper, a novel unsupervised approach is proposed that is capable of exploring a broader set of counters (not limited to the handpicked Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)). The goal is to leverage the dependencies between the counters in order to discover complex state changes that might have otherwise slipped the operator’s view. This paper proposes ADT, an AI-driven telemetry processing solution that facilitates monitoring of a larger set of counters. The Detector block of ADT is known as DESTIN, a multivariate unsupervised change detection for high dimensional time-series data of originally low effective dimension, which provides near real-time state assessment of network devices. The efficiency of the proposed approach is demonstrated and compared with well-known methodologies on an experimental test-bed. The method’s performance is also explored extensively considering different criteria such as traffic type, device and the type of events to identify its potentials and limitations. The datasets used for the evaluation are made publicly available.