Automated monitoring and detection of resource-limited NFV-based services

The growing demand for flexibility and cost reduction in the telecommunication landscape directs the focus of service development heavily to programmability and softwarization. In the domain of Network Function Virtualization (NFV), one of the goals is to replace dedicated hardware devices (such as switches, routers, firewalls) with software-based network functionalities, showing comparable performance when deployed on common servers. In this paper, we discuss how current VNF implementation and deployment strategies impact the efficient monitoring of their resources. In a multi-tenant, NFV-based ecosystem, different Service Providers deploy VNFs on a shared infrastructure, where the Infrastructure Provider exposes only VNF specific metrics and little information about the physical hosts where the VNFs are eventually orchestrated. Especially in the situation where datacenters are overcommitted, detecting the risk of e.g. CPU starvation is not straight-forward, when no information from the physical host is available. A new monitoring technique is introduced, based on the skewness of the measured probability distribution of the VNF resource consumption. Our measurements show that this metric is a good indicator for the (un)availability of the required CPU resources in the datacenter.