NETCONF G. Zheng
Internet-Draft T. Zhou
Intended status: Standards Track A. Clemm
Expires: January 3, 2018 Huawei
July 2, 2017
UDP based Publication Channel for Streaming Telemetry
draft-zheng-netconf-udp-pub-channel-00
Abstract
This document describes a UDP-based publication channel for streaming
telemetry use to collect data from devices. A new shim header is
proposed to facilitate the distributed data collection mechanism
which directly pushes data from line cards to the collector. Because
of the lightweight UDP encapsulation, higher frequency and better
transit performance can be achieved.
Requirements Language
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC2119].
Status of This Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
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Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on January 3, 2018.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2017 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. Solution Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4. UDP Transport for Publication Channel . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.1. Data Format . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.2. Options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4.2.1. Reliability Option . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4.2.2. Authentication Option . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4.2.3. Encryption Option . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4.3. Data encoding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
5. YANG Data Model for Subscription Management . . . . . . . . . 9
6. Retransmission Request . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
7. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
8. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
9. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
10. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
10.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
10.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Appendix A. An Appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1. Introduction
Streaming telemetry refers to sending a continuous stream of
operational data from a device to a remote receiver. This provides
an ability to monitor a network from remote and to provide network
analytics. Devices generate telemetry data and push that data to a
collector for further analysis. By streaming the data, much better
performance, finer-grained sampling, monitoring accuracy, and
bandwidth utilization can be achieved than with polling-based
alternatives.
Sub-Notif [I-D.ietf-netconf-subscribed-notifications] and YANG-Push
[I-D.ietf-netconf-yang-push] defines a mechanism that allows a
collector to subscribe to updates of YANG-defined data that is
maintained in a YANG [RFC7950] datastore. The mechanism separates
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the management and control of subscriptions from the transport that
is used to actually stream and deliver the data. Two transports have
been defined so far, Netconf and Restconf/HTTP2.
While powerful in its features and general in its architecture, in
its current form the mechanism needs to be extended to stream
telemetry data at high velocity from devices that feature a
distributed architecture. Specifically, there are two aspects that
need to be addressed:
1. The transports that have been defined so far, Netconf and HTTP2,
are ultimately based on TCP and lack the efficiency needed to
stream data continuously at high velocity. A lighterweight, more
efficient transport, e.g. a transport based on UDP is needed.
* Firstly, data collector will suffer a lot of TCP connections
from many line cards equipped on different devices.
* Secondly, as no connection state needs to be maintained, UDP
encapsulation can be easily implemented by hardware which will
further improve the performance.
* Thirdly, because of the lightweight UDP encapsulation, higher
frequency and better transit performance can be achieved,
which is important for streaming telemetry.
2. The current design involves a single push server. In the case of
data originating from multiple line cards, the design requires
data to be internally forwarded from those line cards to the push
server, presumably on a main board, which then combines the
individual data items into a single consolidated stream. This
centralized data collection mechanism can result in a performance
bottleneck, especially when large amounts of data are involved.
What is needed instead is support for a distributed mechanism
that allows to directly push multiple individual substreams, e.g.
one from each line card, without needing to first pass them
through an additional processing stage for internal
consolidation, but still allowing those substreams to be managed
and controlled via a single subscription.
This document specifies a distributed data collection mechanism which
can directly push data from line cards to a collector by using a UDP
based publication channel. Specifically, the following are
specified:
o A higher-performance transport option for YANG-Push that leverages
UDP.
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o Extensions to YANG-Push's subscription model that allow a single
subscription to control multiple internal data originators that
each generate their own independent telemetry streams. Note:
Because the ability to support multiple streams via a single
subscription might be applicable to other transports as well, this
aspect might be split into a separate specification in future
revisions of this draft.
While this document will focus on the data publication channel, the
subscription can be used in conjunction with the mechanism proposed
in [I-D.ietf-netconf-yang-push] with necessary extensions.
2. Terminology
Streaming telemetry: refers to sending a continuous stream of
operational data from a device to a remote receiver. This provides
an ability to monitor a network from remote and to provide network
analytics.
Component subscription: A subscription that defines the data from
each individual entity which is managed and controlled by a single
subscription server.
Subscription agent: An agent that streams telemetry data per the
terms of a component subscription.
3. Solution Overview
The typical distributed data collection solution is shown in figure
1. The subscription server located in the main board receives the
subscription requests or configurations. It may be colocated, not
necessary, with a Netconf server which interacts with outside
clients. When receiving a subscription request, the subscription
server decomposes the subscription into multiple component
subscriptions, each involving data from a separate internal telemetry
source, for example a line card. The component subscriptions are
distributed within the device to the subscription agents located in
line cards. Subsequently, each line card generates its own stream of
telemetry data, collecting and encapsulating the packets per the
component subscription and streaming it to the designated data
collector.
The publication channel supports the reliable data streaming, for
example for some alarm events. The subscriber has the option of
deducing the packet loss and the disorder based on the information
carried by the notification data. And the subscriber will decide the
behavior to request retransmission. The subscriber can send the
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retransmission request to the subscriber server for further
processing.
Subscription server and subscription agents interact with each other
in several ways:
o Subscription agents need to have a registration or announcement
handshake with the subscription server, so the subscription server
is aware of them and of lifecycle events (such as subscription
agents appearing and disappearing).
o The subscription server relays the component subscriptions to the
subscription agents.
o The subscription agents indicate status of component subscriptions
to the subscription server. The status of the overall "master"
subscription is maintained by the subscription server. The
subscription server is also responsible for notifying the
subscriber in case of any problems of component subscriptions.
The rest of the draft describes the UDP based publication channel.
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retransmission + +
request | | subscription
+------------------------+
| | | Main Board|
| +--v----v--------+ |
| | subscription | |
| | server | |
| +--+----+-----+--+ |
| | | | | internal
+------------------------+ subscription
| | | distribution
+---------------+ | +--------------+
| | |
+------------------+ +------------------+ +------------------+
| | | | | | | | |
| +-------v------+ | | +------v-------+ | | +-----v--------+ |
| | subscription | | | | subscription | | | | subscription | |
| | agent | | | | agent | | | | agent | |
| +--------------+ | | +--------------+ | | +--------------+ |
| Line Card 1 | | Line Card 2 | | Line Card n |
+---------+--------+ +--------+---------+ +----------+-------+
| | |
| | Publication Channel |
+--------------+ | +-----------------+
| | |
+-v-----v-----v-+
| |
| Collector |
| |
+---------------+
4. UDP Transport for Publication Channel
In [I-D.voit-netconf-notification-messages], the transport
independent message header is proposed for the notification use. The
following shim header refers to and implements that message header
definition.
4.1. Data Format
The data format of the UDP based based publication transport is shown
as follows.
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0 1 2 3
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| UDP Header ~
+-------+---------------+-----------------------+---------------+
| Vers. | Flag | Reserved | Msg-Gen-ID |
+-------+---------------+-----------------------+---------------+
| Device ID |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| Timestamp (Seconds) |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| Timestamp (MicroSeconds) |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| Options ~
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| Message Content ~
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
Right after the UDP header, a simple inform header is attached to
carry the necessary information with regard to the streaming mode.
o The Vers. field represents the PDU encoding version. The initial
version value is 0.
o The Flag is a bitmap indicating what features this packet has and
the corresponding options attached. Each bit associates to one
feature and one option. When the bit is set to 1, the associated
feature is enabled and the option is attached. The sequence of
the presence of the options also follows the position in the
bitmap. Right now 3 options are specified.
* bit 0, the reliability option;
* bit 1, the authentication option;
* bit 2, the encryption option;
* other bits are reserved.
o The Msg-Gen-ID stands for the message generator ID. It identifies
the process, either on main board or line cards, which created the
packet.
o The Device ID identifies the device with an global unique number
that will not repeat among all the managed devices. It can be
generated by some unique device information like MAC address.
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o The Timestamp, including the second part and the microsecond part,
indicate the time the message was packaged and sent to the
receiver. The Timestamp is defined per RFC 3339.
o The details of the Options will be described in the respective
sections.
After the inform header is the real content which is encoded. The
actual encoding is based on the subscription, e.g., in binary with
GPB or CBOR [RFC7049].
More details of the content encoding is TBD.
4.2. Options
4.2.1. Reliability Option
The UDP based publication transport described in this document
provides two streaming modes, the reliable mode an the unreliable
mode, for different SLA (Service Level Agreement) and telemetry
requirements.
In the unreliable streaming mode, the line card pushes the
encapsulated data to the data collector without any sequence
information. So the subscriber does not know whether the data is
correctly received or not. Hence no retransmission happens.
The reliable streaming mode provides sequence information in the UDP
packet, based on which the subscriber can deduce the packet loss and
disorder. Then the subscriber can decide whether to request the
retransmission of the lost packets.
In most case, the unreliable streaming mode is preferred. Because
the reliable streaming mode will cost more network bandwidth and
precious device resource. Different from the unreliable streaming
mode, the line card cannot remove the sent reliable notifications
immediately, but to keep them in the memory for a while. Reliable
notifications may be pushed multiple times, which will increase the
traffic. When choosing the reliable streaming mode or the unreliable
streaming mode, the operate need to consider the reliable requirement
together with the resource usage.
When the reliability flag is set to 1. The following option will be
attached
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0 1 2 3
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| Notification ID |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| Previous Notification ID |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
The notification ID is generated continuously by the message
generator. Different subsrcibers share the same notification ID
sequence. Current ID and previous ID will be added in the packets.
For example, there are two subscriber A and B,
o Notification IDs for the generator are : 1,2,3,[4,5],6,7,8,9, in
which Subscriber A subscribes [1,2,3,6,7], Subscriber B subscribes
[1,2,4,5,7,8,9].
o A will receive : [0,1][1,2][2,3][3,6][6,7]
o B will receive : [0,1][1,2][2,4][4,5][5,7][7,8]
4.2.2. Authentication Option
TBD
4.2.3. Encryption Option
TBD
4.3. Data encoding
Subscribed data can be encoded in GPB, CBOR, XML or JSON format. It
is conceivable that additional encodings may be supported as options
in the future. This can be accomplished by augmenting the
subscription data model with additional identity statements used to
refer to requested encodings.
5. YANG Data Model for Subscription Management
To enable the UDP based publication transport, the subscription
configuration need to provide necessary information. The
subscription management YANG Model extends ietf-subscribed-
notifications described [I-D.ietf-netconf-yang-push]
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+--rw subscription-config {configured-subscriptions}?
| + ...
| +--rw receivers
| | + ...
| | +--rw protocol? transport-protocol
| | | +--rw udp-transport-type? udp-transport-type
| | | +--rw reliable?
| | | +--rw authentication?
| | | +--rw encryption?
As in the above YANG tree, when the transport protocol is set to UDP,
retries indicates the maximum retry times of the reliable streaming
mode, and the timeout indicates the time out for retry in reliable
streaming mode.
TBD. Note this YANG tree just to show we need to extend subcription
mode, including the configurations and the RPCs. More details will
be added later.
6. Retransmission Request
TBD
7. IANA Considerations
TBD
8. Security Considerations
9. Acknowledgements
The authors of this documents would like to thank Eric Voit, Tim
Jenkins, and Huiyang Yang for the initial comments.
10. References
10.1. Normative References
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.
[RFC7049] Bormann, C. and P. Hoffman, "Concise Binary Object
Representation (CBOR)", RFC 7049, DOI 10.17487/RFC7049,
October 2013, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7049>.
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[RFC7950] Bjorklund, M., Ed., "The YANG 1.1 Data Modeling Language",
RFC 7950, DOI 10.17487/RFC7950, August 2016,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7950>.
10.2. Informative References
[I-D.ietf-netconf-subscribed-notifications]
Voit, E., Clemm, A., Prieto, A., Nilsen-Nygaard, E., and
A. Tripathy, "Custom Subscription to Event Notifications",
draft-ietf-netconf-subscribed-notifications-02 (work in
progress), April 2017.
[I-D.ietf-netconf-yang-push]
Clemm, A., Voit, E., Prieto, A., Tripathy, A., Nilsen-
Nygaard, E., Bierman, A., and B. Lengyel, "Subscribing to
YANG datastore push updates", draft-ietf-netconf-yang-
push-07 (work in progress), June 2017.
[I-D.voit-netconf-notification-messages]
Voit, E., Bierman, A., Clemm, A., and T. Jenkins,
"Notification Message Headers and Bundles", draft-voit-
netconf-notification-messages-00 (work in progress), April
2017.
Appendix A. An Appendix
Authors' Addresses
Guangying Zheng
Huawei
Nanjing, Jiangsu
China
Fax: +
Email: zhengguangying@huawei.com
Tianran Zhou
Huawei
156 Beiqing Rd., Haidian District
Beijing
China
Email: zhoutianran@huawei.com
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Alexander Clemm
Huawei
2330 Central Expressway
Santa Clara, California
USA
Email: alexander.clemm@huawei.com
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