Interfaces for Monitoring and Data Analytics Systems

Software defined networks (SDN) represents one of the most relevant innovations in recent years for the telecom industry. Major operators are planning to progressively migrate their transport networks, including optical, to such paradigm to take advantage of the programmability of connectivity services. In SDN, resources are abstracted at the networking level and exposed via a north-bound interface to management systems. On the other hand, Monitoring and Data Analytics (MDA) systems can collect monitoring data and make them accessible to external systems, such as billing platforms, to accurately charge users for the services they consume. In addition, in dynamic scenarios, where resources could be created, modified and removed on demand, MDA systems can also facilitate autonomic networking, and thus coordination between SDN and MDA is strictly required. In this paper, we present two monitoring interfaces for MDA systems: the Monitoring (M)-Control, Orchestration, and Management (COM) interface, an east-west interface that enables MDA systems to gather and synchronize operational and telemetry information from multiple COM modules, e.g., an SDN controller or a cloud resource manager, and issue recommendations to the COM modules as a result of data analysis; and the IO4 interface, a MDA north-bound interface that facilitates exporting monitored data to external systems. Functionality of each interface is described from the conceptual viewpoint and relevant operational workflows are proposed.