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July 23, 2020

Telemetry: Can You See the Edge?

By Suresh Ravindran, Senior Director, Software Engineering

So far in our series Living on the Network Edge, we have looked at trends driving Intelligence and Performance to the network edge. In this blog, let’s look into the need for visibility into the network.

As automation trends evolve, the number of connected devices is seeing explosive growth. IDC estimates that there will be 41.6 billion connected IoT devices generating a whopping 79.4 zettabytes of data in 20251. A significant portion of this traffic will be video flows and sensor traffic which will need to be intelligently processed for applications such as personalized user services, inventory management, intrusion prevention and load balancing across a hybrid cloud model. Networking devices will need to be equipped with the ability to intelligently manage processing resources to efficiently handle huge amounts of data flows.

How do you see what you can’t see?

But is your network edgy enough? In order to handle the growth, we’ve seen intelligence pushed to the network edge for application-aware engineering and inferencing applications running in hybrid clouds. In order to keep up with billions of mobile devices using denser applications, we addressed wireless offloading as one method to alleviate the burden on cellular networks. This approach increases the load on edge and enterprise networks with demands for intelligent flow processing capabilities to efficiently utilize the LAN and WAN bandwidth.   With intelligence and performance in place, we also need to address the growing complexity associated with “seeing” how network switching resources are being utilized. Visibility through network telemetry is fundamental to empowering AI-automation, performance, security and troubleshooting. To be proactive and predictive, networks need to be built with switches that look beyond the obvious with intelligent telemetry capabilities.

Intelligent telemetry for effective network visibility

Increased use of analytics and AI for performance monitoring, detection, troubleshooting and response has been ranked a top priority for organizations to achieve their vision of the ideal network. IT professionals leverage telemetry to define workload behaviors requiring network bandwidth timing patterns and whether applications are causing jitter or low-bandwidth issues. In general, telemetry functions have tracked events in hindsight but are now increasingly used to analyze and predict - living on the network edge means monitoring, predicting and managing the anomalies for proactive infrastructure automation and application responses.

An effective telemetry solution also requires network devices to stream a wide range of metadata for network flow and switch resource usage in real time. As streaming telemetry header formats evolve, it is equally important for the switch silicon’s pipeline to have programming abilities which adapt to changes in telemetry tools while performing at line-rate.   

Successfully living at the network edge means detecting and adjusting algorithms in real time. It won’t be enough to move intelligence to the edge and increase the performance for workloads if you can’t see what is happening within the network. Network visibility is crucial in managing workloads to reliably deliver customer and enterprise service level agreements predictively. Telemetry, Intelligence and Performance are critical technologies for the growing borderless campus as mobility and cloud applications proliferate and drive networking functions. In our next blog, we will discuss Security as part of our insights and TIPS to Living on the Network Edge.  Watch out for the edge …

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1 Worldwide Global DataSphere IoT device and data forecast (2019-2023), IDC

Tags: 5g, Data infrastructure, Edge processing, Enterprise networking, Mobility, Multi-Gigabit Ethernet, Network connectivity, Network edge, Network intelligence, secure infrastructure

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