Detecting the performance impact of upgrades in large operational networks

Abstract

Networks continue to change to support new applications, improve reliability and performance and reduce the operational cost. The changes are made to the network in the form of upgrades such as software or hardware upgrades, new network or service features and network configuration changes. It is crucial to monitor the network when upgrades are made because they can have a significant impact on network performance and if not monitored may lead to unexpected consequences in operational networks. This can be achieved manually for a small number of devices, but does not scale to large networks with hundreds or thousands of routers and extremely large number of different upgrades made on a regular basis. In this paper, we design and implement a novel infrastructure MERCURY for detecting the impact of network upgrades (or triggers) on performance. MERCURY extracts interesting triggers from a large number of network maintenance activities. It then identifies behavior changes in network performance caused by the triggers. It uses statistical rule mining and network configuration to identify commonality across the behavior changes. We systematically evaluate MERCURY using data collected at a large tier-1 ISP network. By comparing to operational practice, we show that MERCURY is able to capture the interesting triggers and behavior changes induced by the triggers. In some cases, MERCURY also discovers previously unknown network behaviors demonstrating the effectiveness in identifying network conditions flying under the radar.