We use time-stamping in OSS, but what about geo-stamping?

A slightly left-field thought dawned on me the other day and I’d like to hear your thoughts on it.

We all know that almost all telemetry coming out of our networks is time-stamped. Events, syslogs, metrics, etc. That makes perfect sense because we look for time-based ripple-out effects when trying to diagnose issues.

But therefore does it also make sense to geo-stamp telemetry data too? Just as time-based ripple-out is common, so too are geographic / topological (eg nearest neighbour and/or power source) ripple-out effects.

If you want to present telemetry data as a geo/topo overlay, you currently have to enrich the telemetry data set first. Typically that means identifying the device name that’s generating the data and then doing a query on huge inventory databases to find the location and connectivity that corresponds to that device.

It’s usually not a complex query, but consider how much processing power must go into enriching at the enormous scale of telemetry records.

For stationary devices (eg core routers), it might seem a bit absurd adding a fixed geo-code (which has to be manually entered into the device once) to every telemetry record, but it seems computationally far more efficient than data lookups (please correct me if I’m wrong here!). For devices that move around (eg routers on planes), hopefully they already have GPS sensors to provide geo-stamp data.

What do you think? Am I stating a problem that has already been solved and/or is not worth solving? Or does it have merit?

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