Toward Real-time and Fine-grained Monitoring of Software-defined Networking in the Cloud

Popular cloud infrastructure such as OpenStack, although incorporating a sophisticated module (e.g., Neutron) to handle its multi-layer network abstractions (from physical nodes, to virtual machines, to containers, all of which are multiplied by user-defined subnets), lacks the ability to allow users to both adjust network properties at runtime and track packet-wise activities. To this end, this position paper presents a system designed to enable real-time and fine-grained monitoring of the software-defined networking in cloud computing. While the full integration into OpenStack is still ongoing, we believe that the design, implementation, and open questions of our system development are insightful to the community.