Network Analytics at IETF 116 in Yokohama Japan

With 1005 onsite and 759 remote participants, IETF finally arrived in Japan. The first Asian country after the pandemic season. I have been especially looking forward for this one since we had not only a lot of new draft documents and innovations in our baggage, but because I do speak Japanese, have previously lived and having family and friends here as well.

The picture above shows a group of Network Analytics key players and enthusiasts having fun in front of a massive sized Gundam robot.

With cherry blossoms in full bloom, the weekend started off with the hackathon where we contributed with two open-source and a closed-source implementations of draft-ietf-opsawg-ipfix-on-path-telemetry. Measuring the On-Path delay of in-flight packets in a multi-vendor SRv6 lab environment. Complementing the existing IPFIX entities of ingress/egress interface, source/destination IPv6 address in customer and provider data-plane and next-hop from control-plane with visibility into the Segment Routing Header with draft-ietf-opsawg-ipfix-srv6-srh.

INSA Lyon and Swisscom developed in 2022 a Network Anomaly Detection frame work which allows to recognize changes in the forwarding, control and management plane with customizable expert rules. In this hackathon we added an On-Path delay check, and demonstrated with SRv6 traffic engineering how topology changes affected the On-Path delay in near real-time.

Many thanks Wanting Du , Yannick Buchs and Severin Dellsperger of supporting us remotely. Absolutely amazing what you pulled off here.

On Sunday at IEPG, I had the pleasure to give a presentation about the latest draft document work on integrating YANG push messaging into Apache Kafka message broker. Detailing the challenges with current proprietary vendor YANG push implementations and proposing improvements for proper Data Mesh architecture integration. From the feedback in the side meeting we understood that our contribution in resolving these problems are greatly appreciated by many network operators.

At IPPM, Alex Huang Feng presented two draft documents extending IOAM direct export to align better with On-Path delay measurement and IPFIX export.

• draft-ahuang-ippm-dex-timestamp-ext (Timestamp extension for IOAM Direct Export) adds two optional timestamp fields to IOAM direct export for On-Path delay measurement.
• draft-ahuang-ioam-on-path-delay (On-Path delay Data Field for IOAM) describes how IOAM direct export applies to IPFIX data export.

Aiming for a scalable and interoperable On-Path delay measurement for SRv6 enabled networks.

Benoit Claise and Thomas Graf presented at the OPSAWG working group updates on our existing two draft documents. Export of On-Path Delay in IPFIX is in the meanwhile adopted while Export of Segment Routing IPv6 Information in IPFIX passed OPSAWG last call and moving steadily forward to IESG last call.

• draft-ietf-opsawg-ipfix-on-path-telemetry (Export of On-Path Delay in IPFIX) extends IPFIX to export On-Path delay at scale by preserving Flow Aggregation (RFC7015). Enables network operators to monitor delay Service Level Objectives for their customers by having a statistical delay view over their network. That helps to understand to identify where delay in the network for which service and forwarding-path is being accumulated.
• draft-claise-opsawg-collected-data-manifest (A Data Manifest for Contextualized Telemetry Data) gives context how YANG push metrics where collected (software version, on-change vs. periodical etc.).

Alex Huang Feng presented the latest updates on the existing YANG push transport draft documents, where Thomas Graf had the pleasure to introduce three new and an update on an existing NETCONF notification/YANG push messaging draft documents in the NETCONF working group.

• draft-ietf-netconf-udp-notif (UDP-based Transport for Configured Subscriptions) reaching stable state. Enabling JSON and CBOR export at scale with minimal overhead. The udp-notif Library is open-sourced and we have with pmacct a reference implementation.
• draft-ietf-netconf-distributed-notif (Subscription to Distributed Notifications) describing how multiple YANG publishers can export on one node. Enabling that YANG operational metrics can be directly export from network processors similar as IPFIX already does.
• draft-ahuang-netconf-notif-yang (YANG model for NETCONF Event Notifications) defines the NETCONF notification header introduced in RFC 5277 as a YANG module to enable proper semantic verification on the entire message in Data Mesh.
• draft-tgraf-netconf-notif-sequencing (Support of Hostname and Sequencing in YANG Notifications) adds hostname, publisher-id and sequence numbers to the NETCONF notification header. Enabling the downstream system consuming from Data Mesh to recognize from which network node and YANG publisher the message was originally exported from and measure with sequence number the loss rate.
• draft-tgraf-yang-push-observation-time (Support of Network Observation Timestamping in YANG Notifications) adds the network observation timestamp in the YANG push header. Depending subscription type it describes when the metric was polled or the event change occured in the YANG data store.
• draft-tgraf-netconf-yang-notifications-versioning (Support of Versioning in YANG Notifications Subscription) describes how the YANG push header is being extended with semantic references. Enabling the automated Data Mesh integration without workarounds.

Juan Camilo Cardona Restrepo , Paolo Lucente and Pierre Fran?ois presented updates on four ongoing BMP and a new BMP draft document at the GROW working group. The adoption call for the BMP Path Status draft document has started.

• draft-grow-bmp-tlv (TLV support for BMP Route Monitoring and Peer Down Messages) passed last call and moved on to IESG. Enabling BMP Path Marking TLV.
• draft-cppy-grow-bmp-path-marking-tlv (Path Marking TLV) brings visibility how BGP paths are being installed into the RIB. With this an network operator can verify redundancy end to end.
• draft-ietf-grow-bmp-tlv-ebit (Support for Enterprise-specific TLVs) reached working group adoption state. Enabling future development and testing of new BMP applications.
• draft-cptb-grow-bmp-yang (BMP YANG Module). Reached working group adoption state. Enabling BMP netconf-yang configuration and exporting BMP statistics with YANG push to monitor the BMP process.
• draft-francois-grow-bmp-loc-peer (BMP Loc-RIB: Peer address) was introduced to GROW. Enabling in BMP Local-RIB for route-monitoring messages to describe through which peering the paths has been learned from.

And last but not least we arranged again a side meeting where we showed the latest progress on the YANG/Kafka integration project. Ahmed Elhassany Ph.D. presented the current status in the YANG Confluent Schema Registry integration and answered questions from the audience.

Where Alex Huang Feng showed the YANG push workflow and the YANG push mockup in Scapy with all the different YANG push message types.

All the open-source implementations mentioned in this blog post are available on the following github organisation: https://github.com/network-analytics

All in all a very busy and intensive week with impressive 11 presentations and 14 draft documents. I like to thank all the colleagues and IETF community who contributed and commented on the draft documents.

We are all looking very forward to IETF 117 in San Francisco. Stay tuned.

With best wishes, Thomas