Sketchy With a Chance of Adoption: Can Sketch-Based Telemetry Be Ready for Prime Time?

TL;DR

This paper discusses the potential and challenges of adopting sketch-based telemetry in network monitoring, highlighting research gaps that need addressing for broader industry acceptance.

Contribution

It identifies and formulates key research challenges across the network telemetry ecosystem to facilitate the adoption of sketch-based solutions.

Findings

Highlights resource efficiency and accuracy of sketching algorithms

Identifies fundamental challenges hindering adoption

Calls for community efforts to address research gaps

Abstract

Sketching algorithms or sketches have emerged as a promising alternative to the traditional packet sampling-based network telemetry solutions. At a high level, they are attractive because of their high resource efficiency and accuracy guarantees. While there have been significant recent advances in various aspects of sketching for networking tasks, many fundamental challenges remain unsolved that are likely stumbling blocks for adoption. Our contribution in this paper is in identifying and formulating these research challenges across the ecosystem encompassing network operators, platform vendors/developers, and algorithm designers. We hope that these serve as a necessary fillip for the community to enable the broader adoption of sketch-based telemetry.