In yesterday’s fourth part of this series about modern network service assurance, we wrote this:
I also just stumbled upon OpenTelemetry, an open source project designed to capture traces / metrics / logs from apps / microservices. It intrigued me because just as you have the concept of traces / metrics / logs for apps, you similarly have traces / metrics / logs for networks.
In the network world, we’re good at getting metrics / logs / events, but not very good at getting trace data (ie end-to-end service chains) as described earlier in this blog series. And if we can’t monitor traces, we can’t easily interpret a customer’s experience whilst they’re using their network service. We currently do “service assurance” by reverse-engineering logs / events, which seems a bit backward to me.
Take a closer look at the OpenTelemetry link above, which provides an overview of how their team is going to gather application telemetry. With increasing software-ification of our networks (eg SDN / NFV) and the use of microservices / NaaS / APIs in our management stacks, could this actually be our path to the holy grail of service assurance (ie capturing trace data – network service telemetry)?? Is it data plane? Is it control / management plane? Is it something in between?
Note: The “active measurements” approach described in part 3 is slightly compromised in current form, which is why I’m so intrigued by the potential of extending the concepts of OpenTelemetry into our software / virtual networks.
I’d really love your take on this one because I’m sure there are many elements to this that I haven’t thought through yet. Please leave your thoughts on the viability of the approach.
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